PP councillor criticises waste management in Sagunto in opinion column
In an opinion column, a PP councillor in Sagunto criticises overflowing bins, bad smells and a rise in the waste collection fee that, she says, has not translated into a better service.
A councillor from the People's Party (PP) in Sagunto has written an opinion column for local outlet El Periódico de Aquí sharply criticising the current state of street cleaning and waste collection in the town. The piece opens with a description of overflowing bins, rubbish bags piling up on pavements, and bad smells during summer — a scene the author says some residents have started to see as normal, even though, in her view, it should be a cause for concern for both the public and the local government itself.
The councillor traces the visible start of the problem to the strike at SAG, the company that runs waste collection in Sagunto, which she says exposed an issue she believes already existed before the industrial action began. Her central argument is that, even though the strike has ended, the dirt on the streets has not gone away — which she attributes to how the council manages the service on an ongoing basis, rather than to the strike itself as an isolated episode.
One of the column's most specific claims concerns money: the waste collection fee has doubled, rising, according to the author, from €55 to €111 — twice what residents used to pay for the same service. She argues that this higher charge was introduced with a promise of better service that, in her view, has not been kept, and says the fee increase has come alongside a decline in collection quality rather than an improvement. This figure and assessment come from the author, written from her position as an opposition councillor, and are not independently verified within the article.
The councillor also criticises the town's new bin system, which was presented by the council as a modernisation of the service when it was rolled out. According to her, everyday experience on the streets shows that the new bins simply are not big enough for the volume of waste and that their design makes it harder for residents to dispose of rubbish properly — which, she writes, in practice means more rubbish ending up on the street outside the containers rather than inside them.
Politically, the councillor calls on the local government to change course, listen to residents and openly admit its mistakes in managing the service, rather than — as she puts it — continuing to ignore residents' complaints. Her column ends with a call for municipal taxes to translate into a real, tangible improvement in residents' quality of life, rather than simply more money flowing into the council's coffers without a corresponding improvement in service.
The piece is part of an ongoing local political debate in Sagunto over rising fees and the quality of public services, in which opposition groups have for months been questioning the management of the current local government, led by Mayor Darío Moreno (PSPV-PSOE, the Valencian socialist party). The council has not made any public response to the specific claims in the column through this article, so the figures and criticisms should be understood as the political position of the author and her party group.
For residents of Sagunto, the debate over street cleaning and waste collection has a very direct, everyday dimension that goes beyond party politics: how much they pay on their fee bill, the state of the bins on their own street, and how often rubbish is actually collected. Beyond the political positioning of each council group, the fact that this column has been published at all shows that waste management remains, several months after the end of the SAG strike, one of the local issues generating the most complaints among residents of the town. According to El Periódico de Aquí.
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