The National Association of Local Public Farm Inspectors has warned this country that the mandatory implementation of the new waste collection in Spain has opened a financial crisis that will exceed 2,000 million euros in municipal estimates for the year 2025. Data dealt with by various private entities, and which the inspectors repeat in the introductory hall of their annual conference, indicate that the planned expenditures of the country’s money management amount to 5,325 million euros, while the income of the new institution amounts to only 3,488 million. This gap reflects a coverage of 65.5% which falls within the legal mandate that the tax will not be in deficit.
This obligation, introduced by State Law No. 7/2022, has created a decades-long model that combines costs and taxes to absorb service costs and which now requires taxpayers to cover 100% of expenses. This means that Juan Ignacio Gomar, member of the association’s expert committee, explained that if the legal mandate is met, the average prices approved by the councils could become more expensive, leading to a deficit of $2,000 million in the stock market.
The state standard “dropped an article stating the obligation of the ayuntamientos to create the mission” and this change has led to “insecurity and great inequality between contributors,” explains the expert Segun, who worked on the Libro Blanco that the association will present this week. Jomar says that the fees paid vary greatly between some municipalities and others, and warns that “some tasks will be cancelled, which will generate very noticeable difficulties.” If local companies impose this burden over several practices and the courts later overturn it, the financial impact could be enormous. “In three or four years, we could have councils having to return millions of euros.”
The problem is exacerbated as a number of obstacles were not there before and suddenly appear. In the municipalities where they are located, there has been a sudden increase, sometimes exceeding 200 euros per household. According to Gomar, the increase in financial pressure is “unusual,” especially since seniors do not see a real change in service. “If before the authorities were able to fund management and treatment, now this task is nerve-wracking for citizens because they do not understand why,” he sums up.
The European directive requires taxpayers to remit waste treatment costs, but does not oblige them to charge specific fees, let alone non-deficit fees, the expert recalls. He pointed out that each country can choose the mechanism necessary to achieve environmental goals, and Spain chose the most radical formula.
The result is technical and legal uncertainty that spills over into every region. The obligation to implement the pay-per-generation principle, under which the greatest amount of waste is produced, is one of the largest sources of conflict and an open door to litigation. “How do you calculate what each vehicle or property generates,” Gomar says.
In large cities, where the volume and variety of waste are greater, individual measurement is very complex. Municipal decrees are working to develop different standards for dealing with this account, which opens the way to enormous challenges. Judgments dictated by independent High Courts of Justice can diverge between themselves and the Supreme Court, which still does not have a consistent principle on many of the aspects discussed. “This would be like excess value,” sums up Jomar, referring to the constitutional ruling that made it illegal to calculate the old tax that records the increase in the value of urban natural land.
Arturo Delgado, president of the association, considers the situation to be the result of “years, decades, of the legislator’s abandonment” of the local Hacienda. It states that the waste rate has been modified by “deficient and scarce regulations that create many problems” and that the no-deficit mandate has caused a sudden impact on municipal finances.
Delgado states that Spain acted on the European Commission’s recommendation to create instruments to achieve environmental goals, but the decision to impose a mandatory tax on all municipalities was adopted “in a simple way” and without prior standard development, leaving the technical details behind. Every countess. Inspectors are sure that the result has been an economic burden that has been hastily transferred to both local authorities and citizens, with consequences that will translate into thousands of hours of technical work and which, predictably, will lead to a lawsuit.
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