Tuesday, November 28, 2023, 10:38 p.m.
The La Regia rambla, if the weather does not spoil it, is on its way to becoming a forest. Nearly a hundred trees have been planted in recent weeks in this urbanization in the interior of Orihuela Costa. But, far from what it may seem, it is not an initiative of any environmental organization. The workers who made the plantation work for the Orthem company and do so for a much more mundane reason. They are complying with an improvement that they offered when they were awarded a contract from the City Council a whopping 19 months ago and, possibly, that is not their rightful place, according to Ciudadanos.
The contract was called like this: “Renovation of playgrounds and adaptation of green areas in Punta Prima, Cabo Roig and La Zenia.” It was awarded to the Murcian construction company for 121,000 euros (VAT included) after presenting 713 new trees and ten extra children’s games as improvements to the plantation. But what do these places, on the front line, have to do with an area far from the interior of the Oriola coast? The mayor of the orange party and resident on the coast, Luisa Boné, criticizes that the current PP-Vox government team would not have correctly fulfilled this contract. She assures that in the contract documents it was clearly indicated that the trees that will be offered as improvements should be located in the area of action, that is, in those three aforementioned parks and not in La Regia.
The current Councilor for Infrastructure, Víctor Valverde (PP), claims to know about these works and reproaches the oranges for not giving a prompt resolution to the assignment through the previous Councilor for Infrastructure, Ángel Noguera, from Ciudadanos. Boné answers that the municipal technicians told Noguera that the trees should not be planted at that time because it was not the best time to carry out reforestation. Most experts agree that fall is the best time to plant trees. For Valverde, this does not justify the delay in resolving the contract in any case. “Wasn’t it the time to put up the children’s games that were offered as an improvement?” He responds ironically.
The Ciudadanos councilor observes that these trees are more necessary in the points initially marked by the contract. She assures that the Punta Prima viewpoint (next to the church and the restaurant), Mistral Street in Cabo Roig and the Cala Cerrada park, in La Zenia, despite being very popular with families with children, barely have any shade. Likewise, she expresses her doubts that the trees already planted will survive in La Regia, “on land where they do not have irrigation, compared to the parks indicated by the contract, which do have it,” Boné points out. “Or that a Dana comes and, when they are standing on a boulevard, a flood washes them away,” she adds.
Lack of maintenance
It should be remembered that the management of the parks was one of the main criticisms that the opposition groups, including the PP, criticized the previous mayor of Infrastructure. At the moment, the general state of the parks leaves a lot to be desired, with broken playground equipment and raised rubber floors that are already very hard and incapable of cushioning the falls of the little ones.
In this sense, the parks that are closest to being able to be renovated are those of La Glorieta and Severo Ochoa park, the busiest in the urban area. In both cases they have a subsidy of 605,783 euros from the Alicante Provincial Council. The rest, Valverde acknowledges, will have to be executed little by little as the budget becomes available. At the moment, repairs have already been made to the streetlights and trees in Ocarasa Park.
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