Sagunto raises cleaning budget by 47% for 2027 amid city growth
Sagunto City Council will raise the budget of public company SAG by 47%, to €23.47 million by 2027, to renew a fleet with vehicles up to 30 years old and expand the cleaning and gardening workforce.
The budget Sagunto will devote to street cleaning and waste collection in 2027 comes to €23.47 million, almost €7.6 million above the €15.95 million that the public company SAG currently manages this year for both services combined. That gap, a 47% rise over just four years, already appears in the new Annual Investment and Financing Plan (PAIF), the multi-year financial roadmap the local government uses to project spending, approved for the coming exercise.
Behind the adjustment lies an urban shift residents can already see on almost every street: new factories and workers arriving from elsewhere are pushing up both household waste volumes and the amount of parks and green space that need regular care, in a town whose cleaning and gardening services were originally sized for a considerably smaller population than the one it has today.
Behind the rise there is also, according to Council sources, an inherited structural problem: SAG's staff numbers were already insufficient for the workload, and a large part of its vehicle fleet was over 30 years old and built to no single common model, which multiplied breakdowns and made day-to-day organisation of the service far more complicated than it should have been. On top of that structural gap, Sagunto gains roughly a thousand new residents every year, a steady pace of growth that keeps driving up both the volume of waste generated and the green areas that need ongoing maintenance.
The biggest percentage jumps fall on gardening — the upkeep of parks, verges and green areas — up from €2.05 million to €3.67 million, a rise of 78.8%, and on street cleaning, up from €4.31 million to €6.54 million, a 66.36% increase. Next come urban solid waste collection and the transfer plant where it is processed, up 25.24% to €4.99 million, and the cleaning of public buildings, up 20.23% to close to €4.05 million. Together, those four budget lines account for most of the extra €7.6 million the Council plans to spend.
Facing the criticism, the local government insists the investment will not hit residents' pockets. It notes that a legal requirement applied to all Spanish councils, not a local choice, forced the 2025 rise in the waste fee, and sets against that forced rise several of its own cuts: property tax (IBI) sits at its lowest-ever level, there are discounts of up to 40% for households that recycle, and support for vulnerable families has been expanded. Taken together, the Council argues, those measures show the extra spending on SAG is being financed through better management of the town's overall finances rather than passed directly on to households.
The opposition does not share that account. At Friday's plenary session, Iniciativa Porteña voted against the 2027 plan, and its councillor, Manuel González, set SAG's 47% budget rise against the 8.9% accumulated inflation since January 2023, asking whether all that extra spending is actually showing on the streets. The party is demanding the Council explain how those accounts will affect the 2027 waste fee, and proposes, as an alternative, linking that fee to each household's actual water use instead of a flat rate that, in its view, does not reflect how much waste each household actually generates.
That political pushback carries limited weight in the current term, however: according to Wikipedia, Iniciativa Porteña won 3 council seats and 11.85% of the vote (3,762 ballots) in the 2023 local elections, two seats fewer than the 5 it had won in 2019, a result that leaves the party without enough votes on its own to block the PAIF, even though it can force the debate into the public record.
For residents, the change will not just be a figure on a spreadsheet: if the extra staff and fleet arrive as planned, it should mean more frequent cleaning rounds, bins emptied more regularly, and fewer breakdown-related problems in the fastest-growing areas, such as the newest housing developments and the industrial estates where new companies have set up. The City Council, however, has not set out a neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood timetable or public indicators that would let residents check, over time, whether the extra spending really produces a cleaner city or whether it ends up, as the opposition fears, as a purely accounting adjustment. Until such indicators exist, the clearest test most residents will apply is the simplest one: whether the bins near their homes get emptied on time, and whether streets in the newer neighbourhoods end up looking as well kept as those in the historic centre.
The local government maintains that boosting the public company's resources is, for now, the only way to keep pace with Sagunto's growth and move past a fleet it calls outdated, and expects SAG's modernisation to gradually translate into a better service in the coming years. According to El Periódico de Aquí, with additional data from Wikipedia.