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.

The local tax bill

I just got a scary looking email. It was full of number codes and it came from the Government of Spain. My first thought was that it was a fine, the second that it was a scam. In fact it was from SUMA, the local tax collection agency, to tell me that a couple of new household bills were waiting for me on their website. Official Spanish is laced with over complicated and little used words. They really do need to start using plain, everyday language.

Britons living in Spain often complain about Spanish tax. I can't actually find anything on the internet that directly compares the average tax burden between countries. I suppose, in the end, there are so many variables, from obvious taxes like income tax and VAT/IVA through to the sugar tax on soft drinks, that it's almost impossible to calculate. What there are are official figures, at country level, about how much tax revenues represent, as a percentage of the total budget. For instance in the UK taxes represent 35.5% of the total GDP. In Spain that figure is 38.4%. So, in Spain, a greater percentage of the money that runs the country comes from taxation - that's all forms of taxation from tobacco duty and corporation tax through to inheritance tax. The specific gripe of Britons is that they feel the Spanish Government takes more of their personal wealth than the British one did and I don't know whether they are right or not.

Whatever other Britons might say I still take a sort of guilty pleasure when I get notification of my road tax and it's less than 20€ for the year. Our IBI which is a bit like Council Tax, for the year, in Culebrón, is 97.41€. In Huntingdonshire, the last place we lived in England, I understand the average (mean) council tax is now £1,860 per year. That's a bit of a saving, in fact it's more of a saving than my Spanish income tax bill for the year.

Our Culebrón water bill for the first six months of the current water year is 41.70€. From the detail on the bill it seems that the actual cost of the water is 0.0518636363636364 cents  - five hundredths of a cent - per litre. With all the additional costs for renting the water meter and paying towards the upkeep of the system the real cost per litre comes out at a staggering 0.0956363636363636 cents or, rounded up, a tenth of a cent per litre.

That water price reminded me of the furore there was in 2005 or 2006 when the boss of Nestlé argued that water wasn't a right, it was, he said, just another foodstuff best valued and distributed by the free market. The quote was taken out of context and used to beat Nestlé with a stick but, given their reputation for dodgy marketing and exploiting the poor, that's hardly surprising. Anyway if you decided that you wanted to buy bottled, Nestlé brand water from our local supermarket the cheapest you can get works out at 34 cents per litre - 350 times more expensive than our tap water. The cheapest, own brand,  bottled water from a local supermarket is only 112 times more expensive than the tap borne equivalent.

Just to make any British readers groan my car tax is 17.39€. The same car would cost £180 in the UK. The other bills we get locally are 60€ a year for rubbish collection and 41€ for drainage. That last one I don't particularly like given that the drains installed in the village fell short of our house by about 300 metres. We're paying for something we don't have, something tangible and real, not a shared community asset like education or road signs and that seems a bit unfair. On the other hand it's only 41€ so I can just about bear it.

______________________________________________-

Here's the, translated, email I got from the Spanish Government/SUMA

THIS EMAIL IS IN RELATION TO A NOTICE OF AN ELECTRONIC COMMUNICATION.

Please be informed that a new communication is available for CHRISTOPHER JOHN THOMPSON with NIF/NIE ***935*** as the named person with the following details:

Cardholder CHRISTOPHER JOHN THOMPSON with NIF/NIE: ***935***

Issuing body: O.A. Suma Gestion Tributaria Diputacion de Alicante, with DIR3: LA0004956

Identifier: 743506564db1b955160d

Quality: CSV-2023.2727.6758.4931

Link: This was a webpage address

You can access this communication at the Single Enabled Electronic Address (DEHÚ) of the General Access Point, available at: https://dehu.redsara.es

We provide a direct link to the communication.

Government of Spain

Equivalence

Often, when we encounter something new, we describe it my comparison to something that we recognise. A turnip?- well, it's a bit like a swede. We Britons living in Spain often use this equivalence for things Spanish. Sometimes the idea is spot on; IVA and VAT, the sales tax, is alike in all but name and rate. It doesn't work for lots of things though. The car roadworthiness test for instance, the ITV, isn't really much like the MOT but it's sort of the same and we know what we mean. And MPs are not a bit like Spanish diputados except that they are the rank and file national politicians. After all the blue whale and the field mouse are both mammals, they suckle their live born young, but they're not quite the same. Morning, afternoon and evening are different too. If the plumber says they'll be around in the afternoon then you shouldn't give up on them till about 8.30pm just like 1.30pm is still very much morning. I still get caught by someone saying we must get a drink "por la tarde", I think afternoon and they're thinking just after work.

I have great difficulty in trying to explain about the difference between British style public holidays and Spanish style non working days without misusing the word holiday. The idea I have, entrenched with me since I was a lad, is that non working days are holidays. Easter Monday and May Day are holidays and the couple of weeks in Skeggy in July are holidays too. For Spaniards a holiday is a holiday and a day off work is a "festive" day. Amongst we Britons the idea of a public holiday is that it's a part of our holiday entitlement. So, if Christmas Day and Boxing Day, both of which are UK Public Holidays, fall on a Saturday and Sunday then we will get compensatory days on Monday and Tuesday. The Spanish idea is different. Spaniards have working days and non working days. Their "non working" calendar includes certain days and anniversaries which are national non working days - Constitution Day, All Saints, Good Friday plus some regional non working days decided by each Autonomous Community and, finally, a couple of local non working days which will be different in Pinoso to the local days in say Monóvar or Elda. If the day off falls on a working day, that's Monday through Saturday, then lots of people, won't have to go to work. If the non working day/anniversary falls on a Sunday then people won't have to go to work either. So, to a Spanish legislators way of thinking, the effect is the same. Last year for instance The day of the Valencian Community fell on a Saturday. The day was marked in the calendars as a non working day but, as most working people don't habitually work on Saturdays, it made absolutely no difference to the vast majority of working people in Alicante, Valencia or Castellón. They finished on Friday afternoon and went back to work on Monday morning. It was the same with Christmas day in 2021 and January 1st 2022 was another Saturday. Father's day is a National non working day but, in 2022, it will fall on a Saturday so most people won't really notice the difference - well, except for the meal. That's why neither Mother's Day nor Easter Sunday feature as "holidays" in Spain because Sunday isn't a working day. It also means that the public days off work vary from year to year.

This idea of finding an equivalent struck me the other day when someone asked me about their Suma. Suma is a tax collection agency that was set up by the provincial level government of Alicante back in 1990. It basically assesses, bills, collects and enforces local taxes for the municipalities in Alicante Province. Suma doesn't set the taxes, the local municipalities do. So, Pinoso, our town council, uses Suma to collect Road Tax and so does Sax Town Council but the tax for the same type of cars, the least environmentally friendly, is 154€ in Pinoso and 201€ in Sax. And there you have an example - I said Road Tax but that tax here is qualitatively different to the Motor Duty payable in the UK. The tax we pay here, el impuesto sobre vehículos de tracción mecánica, is a local tax that pays Town Hall wages, the fiesta fireworks and the Christmas lights rather than the upkeep of the nation. That's one of the reasons why, traditionally, there are a lot of toll roads in Spain. Actually with the ending of so many toll road contracts and the bankruptcy of others the National Government is considering ways to raise money for road maintenance from mileage type charges through to a general vehicle duty. 

Now Suma doesn't collect in three of the five municipalities which share a border with Pinoso because they are in Murcia and the person who was talking to me lives in a village that "belongs" to one of those Murciano towns but which, generally, see Pinoso as being their town. It's not surprising that they use the shorthand of saying Suma when they refer to local taxes, "I've not got my Suma bill yet" or "When does the Suma bill come?" because, amongst other things, Suma is much easier to say than alcantillarado or exacciones municipales. Ah!, the joys of foreign living.

The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away

I always called it Road Tax and I suppose that's what it really was, in the beginning. You had a car and you paid tax that was then used to build and repair roads. It's not a principle that's applied to schools or social services but I can see the sense.  Not everybody needs roads so the people with vehicles pay. But UK road tax was abolished in 1937, long before even I was born, and replaced by Vehicle Excise Duty. This is, and was, a tax on cars, not roads, and it goes straight into the general fund.

Here in Spain I pay a vehicle tax too. It's charged by the local town hall and collected on their behalf by a tax management agency, called SUMA. SUMA is a local organisation created by most of the Alicante town halls, working collectively, to collect local taxes. The tax on the Arona for this year is a bit short of 18€. Obviously comparing a local tax with a central government tax is unreasonable but it looks as though the Vehicle Excise Duty in the UK for the same car would be £155. 

The roads have to be paid for somehow and we have a lot of toll motorways in Spain. The motorway that runs up the Mediterranean coast was a toll road for years but most of that became free at the beginning of 2020. Not all the local motorways are free though and we still have a couple of paying motorways close to us. There's one that goes around Alicante and another that branches off the Mediterranean motorway heading for Torrevieja and Cartagena. In the olden days, when we weren't confined to our home region and we could stay out after 10pm, the SatNav often warned us of tolls. I think we were paying 12 centimos for every kilometre on the Mediterranean motorway just before the toll was removed so that popping up to see pals in Altea, which only took a bit over an hour, cost around 18€ for the round trip. 

I don't like tolls much. It's not that they are inherently bad but they always strike me as expensive. On October 7th 2004 my diary entry says that my 1977 MGB GT covered the 1349 miles from Huntingdon to Santa Pola using about 200€ worth of petrol and with 120€ in tolls. MGBs are old and thirsty cars. Mine had the steering wheel on the wrong side for paying tolls on the European mainland. I got quite a lot of exercise, running around the car. The cat in the passenger seat was no help at all!

Anyway. You may have noticed that we've been having a bit of a problem with a virus. Like nearly everyone else the EU decided to print money to deal with this. They told Spain they could have 140 billion to fund a recovery plan. There were lots of conditions to getting the money, most of which I don't remember, or never knew, but the news reports always mention principals like developing modern infrastructure and being greener. Spain had to write a plan to say how it intended to spend the billions but also how it intended to help itself. Apparently the plan is only about 800 pages longer than Tolstoy's War and Peace and on, at least, one of those pages is the plan to introduce or reintroduce tolls on all Spanish motorways.

I can't imagine that the new tolls, due for 2024, will be paid at toll booths by actually handing over coins or banknotes or even virtual money but, however they track my use and make me pay I'm sure I won't like it.

Taking and keeping

I've complained before about our occasional tussles with "authority" here in Spain and how it's quite tricky to complain or fight back. It's not just the language. Some of the processes can be a bit Kafka, a bit Catch 22.

You may remember that the tax people questioned my 2014 tax returns. It cost me 118€ to defend myself, not a lot but 118€ that I could have invested much more wisely in, for instance,  throwing the money in the dust and trampling on it. Their final response after a couple of months was "we will take no further action". They didn't say "whoops" or "sorry" or "here are your expenses" and I rather suspect that we will go through the same rigmarole for my 2015 returns in a few months.

We also had some trouble with the Land Registry, the Catastro. The Land Registry sets the rateable value of houses and this figure is used by the Local Town Hall as a way of fixing the local taxes which, in the end, pay for street lights, parks and gardens and council worker's salaries. An agency called SUMA collects the tax for most of the Town Halls in Alicante province. The Town Halls sets the tax as a percentage of the rateable value. Lets pretend that rate is half a cent on the euro. If your house has a rateable value of 50,000€ then you have to pay 50,000 lots of half a cent or 250€ in local tax.

Our problem was that the Land Registry thought we owned a good percentage of our next door neighbours house. When the Catastro finally sorted this out the rateable value of our house was reduced by about three quarters. Like the tax agency the Land Registry showed no sign of regret when they acknowledged their error. With backdating and what not we have paid this inflated price six times in the last three years.

I expected that, when SUMA sent us our local rates/council tax bill for this year, it would reflect the new, revised, lower Catastro rate and that there would be a refund for those six over payments. But no. The bill was exactly the same amount as last year and they want us to pay the inflated price for a seventh time. I went to talk to the collection agency.

"Ah, well, you see on their last letter the Land Registry say that this rate applies from the day after you receive this letter". I agreed, I'd read that at the time we got the letter, Maggie had read it too, but both of us had failed to grasp the significance. We should have contested the ruling and asked for the corrected rateable value to be backdated to when the error had first been made.

I grasped at straws. "Well the bill for this year should be proportional then," I said. "No, the IBI, the local tax, is due on 1st January for the year and, on that date, the rateable value of your house was the older, higher value".

I'll see if we can fight it of course but I suspect that we are, in the vernacular, buggered. There is something immoral though in a Government Agency recognising that there has been a mistake but not refunding the couple of thousand euros that it has collected under false pretences.

Don John

My Spanish is odd. I know a fair bit. I can talk alright but sometimes I can't. Sometimes I can get really flustered and cock it up completely. Sometimes I can laugh at my mistakes and plough on or I can get angry and sulky. Language, or problems with language are still, by far, the biggest stumbling block to my day to day dealings with Spain.

In the last post I mentioned that the Consumer Office had suggested the only way to sort out our overpaid local taxes was to go to the nearest office of the Land Registry, the Catastro, 60 kilometres away in Alicante city. Nowadays, with most government offices, you need to arrange a prior appointment. That doesn't mean you don't have to queue but it does mean you'll get served. There are lots of systems for making an appointment online and even the most basic website usually offers some sort of email possibility. Not the Catastro though. You can get access to plenty of information online but sorting an appointment has to be done by phone.

I used to live on the phone when I had a real job but, nowadays, I find phone calls to help lines really difficult irrespective of the language. First there are the technical problems; the headsets not set up properly so that the volume is too loud or too low and the VOIP connections with the corresponding clicks or echoes on the line. Then there are those more physical problems like balancing the phone under your chin whilst you search for the reference number that you didn't expect them to ask for. Now add in the Spanish. If talking to people face to face can vary from ordinary and normal to a bit embarrassing talking to people on the phone, for me, tends towards nightmare. There are non of those corporal cues to help - you can't nod or gesticulate or smile - it all depends on the words that you utter and only on the words.

So, I'd put off phoning the Catastro as long as I could. As I pressed the number buttons on the phone I remembered approaching the end of the 10 metre board at the swimming pool in Skipton when I was a boy. The connection was dodgy - a beep on the line every three seconds or so. I listened to the "Please hold we'll be with you in a moment" message for a while with the knot in my stomach getting tighter and tighter. "How can I help you today?" said a cheery voice in Spanish with a nice clear accent. No niceties on my part I just blurted out "I want to arrange an appointment with the Alicante office" with the Spanish steeped in the broadest of Yorkshire accents. Questions and answers; ID numbers, reference numbers, post codes, phone numbers - easy questions. Then there was a question about why I wanted to speak to them, I fluffed and muttered. The man said "Ya". Ya is a multi-use, often confirmatory, word that can mean lots of things. When he said it he said it in a way that I know well, with the vowel sound lengthened and a click at the end, so that it sounds resigned and world weary. I got the appointment though.

As he confirmed the place, date and time he made the mistake, common amongst Spaniards used to their double barrelled surnames, of thinking that my middle name was my surname. Thank you for your call to the Catastro today Don John. As I sniggered I failed to say "adios" properly. Ending on a low note.