Three companies bid for 66-million-euro cleaning services contract in Nerja

The tender for Nerja’s largest municipal contract, valued at around 66.1 million euros to outsource waste collection, street cleaning and beach cleaning for the first time over the next decade, faces a further procedural step before the evaluation of the bids can proceed.

The three companies that have submitted bids for the eastern Costa del Sol town; Althenia, the joint venture comprising FCC Medio Ambiente and FCC Equal CEE Andalucía, and Valoriza Servicios Medioambientales, remain in the running, although the tender committee has identified an issue regarding the extent of the confidentiality declared in relation to their technical proposals.

The three proposals were submitted on 13 April, within the stipulated deadline and initially passed the review of the administrative documentation. The committee verified that the companies met the required criteria and agreed to admit them to the procedure.

However, the problem arose when the so-called ‘envelope two’ was opened, which contains the technical bids to be assessed using criteria involving value judgements. According to the minutes of the meetings held on 19 June and 1 July, which SUR has consulted, the three tenderers had declared either their entire proposals or a "so extensive and significant" part of them to be ‘"confidential" that this was almost equivalent to the entirety of the documentation to be assessed.

The committee considers that accepting such a broad reservation regarding information could hinder the transparency of the procedure and, in particular, the obligation to explain the reasons why one proposal is awarded a higher score than the others.

Those responsible for the procurement process base this position on the Public Sector Contracts Act and on various rulings by specialised administrative courts, which have established that confidentiality "cannot be indiscriminately extended to an entire tender’" Consequently, the town hall requested that Althenia, FCC and Valoriza submit, within three calendar days, a new document specifying which sections should remain confidential on the grounds that they contain genuine technical or commercial secrets.

All three companies responded within the deadline. However, after reviewing the documentation once again, the aforementioned procurement committee concluded at its meeting on 21 July that "the confidentiality declaration covering almost all of the technical material subject to evaluation remains in place". The requested rectification has therefore not fully resolved the issue.

The next step will be to seek external technical assistance. The committee has agreed to forward the documentation to the experts specified in the tender documents so that they may draw up a report determining which parts of each project genuinely meet the necessary conditions to retain their confidential status. The municipal technical experts will then be able to give their opinion, and it will ultimately be the contracting authority that decides which information remains protected and which may be made accessible within the procedure.

This development does not, at least for the time being, result in the exclusion of any company or the suspension or cancellation of the tender. The three bids remain in the running, and no final assessment has yet been made, nor has a successful bidder been proposed. The procedure concerns the definition of confidential information and aims to ensure that, when the time comes to score the bids and select one, the decision can be sufficiently justified and made known to the other participants so that they may, where appropriate, exercise their right to appeal.

The process formally began in March following almost two years of administrative procedures. The town hall justifies the change in management on the grounds of a lack of staff and its own material resources, the ageing fleet and the substantial investment required to modernise the service.

The contract covers waste collection and transport, street and beach cleaning, management of the recycling centre, renewal of vehicles and bins, digital monitoring systems and a new operational base in the Castillo Alto industrial estate area. Municipal workers currently carrying out these tasks will not be taken on by the future contractor; instead, according to the tender specifications, they must be redeployed to other municipal services.

The contract has sparked intense political debate from the outset. While Partido Popular (PP) councillors argue that indirect management will enable the service to be modernised and investments to be made that it considers difficult to fund with municipal resources, the opposition PSOE and Podemos-IU parties have questioned the privatisation, both on account of its cost and its consequences for public sector employment and direct control of the service.

Now, before delving fully into the economic and technical battle between Althenia, FCC and Valoriza, the town hall must decide which parts of these bids can be kept confidential. Only then can the tender process continue, a process that will determine the future of waste collection in Nerja for the next decade.