According to OK Diario, the mayor of Manilva, Mario Jiménez, has signed a decree providing for 88 pay changes for Town Hall employees, an operation that the local PP places among the largest in the council’s history and which has opened a new political front over the lack of information on its cost to the municipal coffers.
For Eduardo Inda’s outlet, the controversy does not centre solely on the fact that 88 municipal employees are to benefit from pay improvements. The Partido Popular of Manilva also questions why some workers have been chosen and not others, what criteria have been used and how much public money the measure will ultimately cost.
And this is where one of the main questions about the operation arises: the real economic cost. According to the PP, the economic report determining how much all Manilva residents will have to pay for these pay improvements has not been made public. The party maintains that the operation could reach «several hundred thousand euros a year».
The approved list also includes several job regradings that have drawn particular attention. Among them are cases such as a driver regraded to administrative assistant, an activities instructor regraded to teacher, a camera operator regraded to administrative officer and a person in charge of RTV regraded to head of cleaning.
The PP, however, adds an important qualification to its complaint: it does not claim that these regradings are incorrect. What it demands is that the Town Hall explain and justify each of them with documentation.
According to the party, the report from the General Secretariat itself establishes that each case must be individually substantiated. That is, it must be justified which higher-level duties each worker actually performs, since when they have been performing them, what organisational need motivates the change, what pay difference exists and, in addition, that there is sufficient budget allocation to cover the increase.
The criticism does not come from the PP alone. One of the elements the opposition party considers most relevant is the position expressed by the president of the Staff Committee and general secretary of UGT, who is said to have described the approved list as «arbitrary and incomplete», with an «alarming lack of technical rigour» and a procedure that was «defective and opaque in form». According to the complaint circulated by the PP, this person abstained in the vote.
The PP of Manilva says it does not know the exact amount and calls for the economic report that would allow the impact of the pay changes to be quantified to be made public. The party warns that it could involve hundreds of thousands of euros a year in public money, although it stresses that it will be the official documentation that determines the final cost.
The PP demands all the reports
In view of this situation, the Partido Popular announces that it will ask the Town Hall for the economic report, the individual reports required by the Secretariat, the audit by the Intervention office and the criteria used to determine why some workers receive these improvements and others do not.
The matter is particularly relevant because the pay changes will have an impact on the Town Hall’s staffing costs and, therefore, on the municipal accounts. For that reason, the opposition is demanding that Mario Jiménez’s government explain in detail the procedure followed.
The PP’s complaint does not directly accuse the Town Hall of having committed an irregularity in the regradings. Its demand focuses on something different: that each decision be backed by the corresponding documentary and economic justification.
