Although the city of Barcelona in the Spanish region of Catalonia is a Blue Municipality/Blue City, the city’s water supply is run by a private company (SUEZ). The city council of Barcelona has been fighting for years to remunicipalise the water services. Other municipalities in the Catalan region are making progress. Over the last 5 years, more than 50 municipalities have gone to court in order to gain direct water management.
Picture above: The meeting room of Vidreres Town Hall full of residents concerned about the water service situation
The municipality of Vidreres plans to complete the municipalisation of its water services this autumn, ending the management contracts with the concessionaires. Vidreres Town Council is planning to start supplying water to homes in the autumn, marking the final stage of the municipalisation process that has been under way for years, and bringing to an end 40 years of concessionary management of the water supply. Now there seems to be light at the end of the tunnel. The mayor, Jordi Camps, has warned that once the supply is back in municipal hands, ‘the unfinished pavements and the theft of supplies will come to an end’. He also said that they would work to find water leaks and minimise losses in the network. On 1 August, the city council approved a loan of 1.5 million euros to finance investments in the water supply. It also gave the go-ahead to allocate 50,000 euros for “rapid action to repair leaks and solve problems of supply shortages”. The plenary session was attended by a large number of residents, fed up with the lack of a constant water supply that they have suffered for years.
The municipalisation of water is also progressing well in the municipality of Sant Hilari. At the plenary session of the Sant Hilari Sacalm Town Council on 31 July, the documentation for the municipalisation was presented, with the ultimate aim of the council having control over the management of the entire integral water cycle, from the drinking water network to purification.
After 10 years of fighting for public water management, the community of Torrefarrera has won the legal battle for the municipalisation of the water service. The newspaper SEGRE has published the Lleida Administrative Tribunal’s rejection of all the appeals lodged by the previous concessionaire.
Text compiled and translated by Roland Brunner for Blue Community .net
Sources: Catalan newspapers
- Vidreres preveu enllestir la municipalització de l’aigua a la tardor, El Gerio digital, 26 July 2024
- Vidreres aprova un crèdit d’1,5 milions per la municipalització del servei d’aigua. Diari di Girona, 1 August 2024
- Vidreres preveu la municipalització de l’aigua a la tardor. L Pund Avui, 26 July 2024
- Sant Hilari: Crònica del ple del 31 de juliol.
- Torrefarrera: See picture down. Source X
Background
Blue Community co-founder Maude Barlow provides background on the history of water struggles in Spain in her book «Whose water is it, anyway?», published 2019 (see here).
Europe has a long history of public water services, even though the biggest private water utilities are European. However, the financial collapse of 2008 combined with the growing debt of the poorer countries of the EU led to a push to sell off public assets as a condition for debt relief. The European Commission imposed an “austerity” program on countries such as Spain, Italy, Portugal and Greece with water privatization top of the list. Many municipalities began the process of privatizing or partially privatizing their water services in compliance. (p.94)
Private water services made deep inroads into Spain in the 1980s, resulting in an even split between private and public control of the country’s water utilities. The majority of the private concessions are controlled by Agbar, a subsidiary of Suez, and Aqualia, which has links to Veolia. Water cut-offs in Spain have been common in the years since the financial crisis of 2008. Under pressure from the Troika, Madrid and Barcelona committed to privatizing their water services. In 2012, Agbar was granted a 35-year concession by the city of Barcelona for both its drinking and waste water services to be run as a public-private partnership. The contract was granted without a public tender. Madrid city council prepared to privatize 49% of its water utility, Canal de Isabel II, as well.
But the municipal governments underestimated the opposition they would encounter. AEOPAS, the Spanish association of public water operators, and a newly formed water justice group called Aigua és Vida — water is life — launched a national campaign against water privatization.
In 2011, as both cities geared up for the handover, water activists in Madrid gathered more than 35,000 names on a petition to stop the privatization of their water and, a year later, organized a referendum on the subject, setting up more than 350 voting booths around the city. An astonishing 166,000 people participated, 165,000 of whom voted to keep their water public. In Barcelona, groups challenged the contract the city had signed, declaring it invalid and taking the case to the Court of Justice in Catalonia.
In 2015, progressive municipal councils were elected in Madrid and Barcelona. Both councils had ties to the progressive national party Podemos and to the Greens and were committed to the public management of their water services. The Madrid party, Ahora Madrid, immediately stopped the privatizing of the city’s water. Then in 2016, the Court of Justice of Catalonia sided with Aigua és Vida in its legal challenge, saying the Barcelona concession to Agbar was not justified as it was done without public tender. The case has gone to the Spanish supreme court, where a ruling is expected in 2019.
Barcelona en Comú is the citizens’ platform that won the city’s municipal election and immediately set to work to challenge the water privatization. A year later, it launched a network of public operators and civil society organizations to support other cities wanting to re-municipalize their water services. In November 2018, Barcelona city council agreed to hold a referendum on the public management of its water and wastewater services, likely to take place in late 2019. Meanwhile, the cities of Valladolid and Terrassa have decided to cancel their private water concession and bring their water services back under public control. (p.102ff)
