The Ministry of Transport and Sustainable Mobility has just started the first file that could lead to a city council returning EU subsidies for not carrying out the projects for which they were assigned. He has just sent a resolution to the Murcia city council in which he is informed that his proposal to replace the construction of a new bike lane and a new bus lane in the city is denied and replace it with another to expand other already existing ones and he is given five days to present allegations. If the file is not resolved, the Murcian council will have to return the 20.7 million euros it received from European funds for this.
“As these are alterations that depend solely on the will of the city council, the Ministry has rejected the requested modifications. Thus, the municipality must decide whether to execute the full projects, as they were proposed in the application, or renounce the aid granted,” he said. Transportation explained in a note.
This resolution, signed by the new general director of Sustainable Mobility, Álvaro Fernández Heredia, is the first time that the Ministry acts against municipalities that are not carrying out works for which they received amounts from the EU Next Generation Fund intended for the decarbonization of urban transport. To this end, almost 200 Spanish town councils have received up to 1.5 billion – in two calls in 2022 and 2023 – to create low-emission zones, bike lanes or pedestrianize streets, which should be a reality before the end of this year. Otherwise, they will have to return the money they received for it.
The most flagrant case of non-compliance, since it concerns the largest cities and the highest amounts, has to do with the generalized non-compliance with the implementation of low-emission zones. However, the political change in some municipalities after the elections in May last year, in some cases from left-wing mayors to PP-Vox coalitions, such as Valencia, Valladolid or Elche, is leading the new mayors to back down on related projects to create bicycle lanes or promote public transport that involve reducing space for private motorized traffic.
This is not the case of Murcia, with the same PP mayor as the one that in the previous legislature requested the funds to carry out the projects to promote active mobility and public transport that it now wants to modify. The city received 20.7 million in the 2021 call. Of them, 7.3 million to build new bike lanes and another 2.4 million for bus lanes.
However, on August 1 of last year he informed Transport that he wanted to modify them, eliminate part of the actions of euros of European financing. Specifically, it wants to leave 8.17 kilometers of bike lanes out of the 34 projected, valued at 2.32 million, 24% of the subsidized action. Regarding the bus lane, the Murcia city council requests to delete two kilometers of the 4.48 kilometers projected, valued at 1.8 million, almost half of the EU subsidies it obtained for it.
It requests Transport to allow it to modify the destination of these funds to, instead, build a pedestrian and cyclist walkway in another part of the city and expand an existing bicycle lane in the University area, actions that the Ministry recalls that The city council also submitted a call for European funds but for which it did not obtain a subsidy.
In its resolution, Transport informs Murcia that the projects are not interchangeable and that the modifications proposed by the city council “alter the nature and objectives of the subsidy, an issue not permitted by the regulations governing these aid” which, remember, were granted in competitive competition, depending on the score obtained by each project. “The score of the request would have been different if it had responded to the current approach, since it is requested to execute new actions and vary the technical conditions of two of the actions granted,” says the Ministry in its resolution.
