Pinoso Water and Rubbish charges

I was chatting to my neighbours the other day. We were talking about the plans for the solar farm which will run along the Southern side of the CV83 (that's on the right as you drive from Pinoso to Monóvar). In the way that these things do the conversation drifted and we ended up talking about our water bills. My Spanish neighbours, whose main home is in Petrer, were blissfully unaware of the system for billing in Pinoso and they didn't know about this years price increases either. I reckoned that if they didn't know then neither would other people. An easy blog beckoned.

I posted this same information in an entry on the Pinoso Community Facebook page back in September 2023. If you read that post you can save yourself effort and stop now.

Here in Culebrón, and I presume throughout Pinoso, households are charged for drinking water on metered use. The bills are raised by Pinoso Town Hall, because they maintain the water system, but the money is collected by an organisation called SUMA. The bills for the third and fourth quarters of the water year are sent out in April and the bills for the first and second quarters of the water year in September. The bill for the drainage charges are also sent in April.

For quite a few years, in the recent past, Pinoso was a very wealthy town because the Town Hall charged an extraction fee on the marble dug out of the Monte Coto quarry. The quarry is inside the Pinoso municipal boundary but it overlooks the nearby village of Algueña. According to Levantina Stone (The biggest producer in the quarry) it's the largest marble quarry in the world. I seem to remember that, at the height of production, the quarry was adding 9 million euros to the town coffers though I know that the Town Hall usually quotes the maximum income as 6 million. Either way for a town with a population just over 8,000 people the income was quite a bonus. It kept local taxes and fees low and provided funds for all sorts of projects. As the building bubble collapsed so did the income from the quarry. The pandemic didn't help business much either. Nonetheless the income from the quarry seems to have levelled off at about two million euros per year. In the meanwhile Pinoso has noticeably cut back on lots of things to save money and increased charges in a number of ways to boost income. At a town meeting we were told that Pinoso's current annual budget is around 10 million, which, they said, is pretty average for a town of the size of Pinoso, but, unlike most towns Pinoso still has this extra, bonus, income stream. I noticed that the actual income for 2023 was nearly twelve and a half million and the expenditure eleven and a half million.

The Town Hall argues that the couple of millions of marble money has largely been propping up the price of drinking water and the collection and processing of waste. There are a whole bunch of factors at work adding complications (and cost) to these two basic services: changes in legislation about waste management, the way that some people misuse the general (green) rubbish bins, the reluctance of people to use the recycling bins, the amount of water available because of climatic conditions, the amount of water allotted to Pinoso, the huge increase in the price of electricity (for pumping water), the age of the water distribution system etc. Between them the two services are costing about a million over the amount of money that the Town Hall collects from local charges. The Town Hall's argument is that if people paid something much more akin to the real cost of the water and waste processing then the marble money would be freed up to provide more and better services. 

As always with these things there are multiple interpretations of the current situation but the Town Hall went ahead and increased the charges. Not that anyone has said this, so this is purely speculation on my part, but I think some of the thinking behind the water increases is that the current distribution system (the pipework) is crumbling and the investment needed to fix the system is beyond the means of the Town Hall. If the system is made profitable that makes the privatisation of the supply a much more tempting offer to private concerns. At some time in the future they may be willing to take on infrastructure improvements in return for a long term contract.

The changes were published as being applicable form 2024 so I suppose that we are now under the new regime. ADDITION It turns out that this wasn't true. There was one appeal against the water rate increase which was dismissed by the Pinoso Town Council at its January 2024 meeting. The Council said at that meeting that the new rates would be published in the Boletín Official and, as soon as they'd been published they would become current.

The rubbish collection charge will double from the current 60€ to 120€ per household

Household water is charged on a sliding scale. In the table below you can see that the first 10 cubic metres will be charged at 48 cents per cubic metre, the next 10 cubic metres at 78 cents and so on. There are different rates for businesses. The agricultural water supplied through the SAT network is not a part of this system.

Block of 0 to 10 m³/quarter 0.4800 €/m³ (Old charge was 0.18 €/m3)
Block of 10.01 to 20 m³/quarter 0.7800 €/m³ (Old charge was 0,28 €/m3)
Block of 20.01 to 40 m³/quarter 1.1500 €/m³ (Old charge was 0,35 €/m3)
Block of 40.01 to 80 m³/quarter 1.9500 €/m³ (Old charge was 0.5625 €/m3)
Block of 80 m³/quarter and any further use at 3.2500 €/m³ (Old charge was 1.3750 €/m3)

There are all sorts of little add ons to the bill for water meter rental, water filtration charges etc. but, as an example, last quarter in our house we used 22 cubic metres of water and the bill was around 22€. My dodgy arithmetic suggests that with the new regime that will rise to about 50€ or maybe a bit more.