It has been barely 48 hours since the Seville City Council took effect The first level of your emergency plan, With local police agents committed to taking special shifts and being available at any time to provide coverage for them … unusual Christmas operations; This measure, derived from the lack of agreement on the productivity that the troops would bear, was met with a massive sit-in by them, at the beginning of the reinforcement services.
Which is that 77 soldiers out of 115 soldiers were assigned to the morning shift this Saturday, a day that includes the lighting of Christmas lights in the afternoon and evening, It was not possible for them to finally join this service, namely 71 regular police officers and six officersa situation that could have been caused mainly by the agents assigned to this transformation as an exceptional reinforcement thanks to the contingency plan, as well as other members of the force to whom this transformation is already compatible.
According to the Seville City Council, agents who have not completed their allotted shift are obligated to do soOfficially approve the medical leave, otherwise they will face the opening of a disciplinary filewith all its consequences.
From the local police union organizations, specifically the CSIF, it was defended that although the headquarters published last Friday a list of agents obligatorily assigned to the shift, this measure did not “personally decree” each of the agents concerned, warning that the order of the local police corps where the list of said forces was published It could only be accessed through the city council’s computers, which according to this union force “did not provide” an effective communication mechanism. For those responsible, in the case of those who were not active the previous day.
CSIF points out in this regard that although the local government activates the first level of the City Emergency Plan by decree, through which agents are obliged to cover these special services compared to the voluntary nature of the traditional Christmas Plan, in practice “There is no real emergency or disaster.”Under the pretext that agents went on their own initiative to cover unusual operations in times of emergency such as Storm Bernard in October 2023 or the last days of heavy rain.
After this situation, of course, our eyes are on this Saturday afternoon and evening on the occasion of The city’s Christmas lights switch-on is at 7:00 p.m. On Avenida de la Constitución, with crowds of people expected for some time before.
The grand parade will take place from 5:30 p.m. «“Night of Light”, Which will include a performance by Pastora Soler, accompanied by the Seville Symphony Orchestra and Christmas Choirs, with the help of the appropriate audience.
At the moment, Seville City Council has not determined how much of the total bill it will have to pay. For these extra hours local policewhich will never exceed the 5.6 million reported in the municipal government’s latest offer to the unions, which demanded at least a repeat of the planning for the previous Christmas, which cost around ten million euros.
Sanz recently warned that “it is not a matter of political will, but of the legal limits set for us by intervention,” reiterating that “Not even the mayor is above the law», because it also affects that in May the 17 million euros allocated for overtime for agents have already been exhausted, in a context in which the structural deficit of active staff and the increasing number of large events in the city combine with the necessary preventive deployments.