Villages of the damned
Municipal employees in the town of Cenicientos haven't been paid since June The crisis is making itself felt hardest in the region's smaller towns and villages
José Ramón Lizana still gets up at 7am every morning to drive a garbage truck. María Dolores Jiménez cleans the village schools. Marifeli Puentes continues to keep a check on births and deaths in the registry office. Alongside them, a further 33 men and women carry on doing their bit to keep Cenicientos, a village of 2,088 people in the west of Madrid, functioning. And they are doing so despite the fact that they've not been paid by their employer, the town hall, since June of last year.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about this story is that Cenicientos' disastrous finances do not set the town apart from the rest of the Madrid region - Madrid City Hall and the large dormitory town of Parla owe one billion euros and 221 million euros to their suppliers, respectively. But it is in the region's smaller towns and villages where the crisis is making itself felt hardest.
The government has put together a 35-billion-euro fund that the regional and local governments can access. But there's a catch. Before they can get their hands on the funds, they have to sign up to deep cuts in personnel and services over the next decade.
José Ramón Lizana has two children, aged six and two, and has had to call on his family for financial help. Ángel Martínez, the town hall's messenger, who is partially disabled, has a mortgage to pay, and has also had to look for help from friends and family to make ends meet.
The mayor doesn't live in the village, and never answers his phone
It's not easy to work out how Cenicientos got into financial trouble. The main challenge is that the mayor, Enrique Jiménez Concejal of the Popular Party, has so far managed to avoid opening the town hall's books. He doesn't live in the village, he never answers his phone, and hasn't called a meeting since November. Local representatives from the two opposition parties say that over the last decade he has only presented two budgets, in 2002 and 2008. They estimate that the village owes around four million euros, and they are calling for the regional government to intervene and take control of the town's accounts. They add that they do not even know whether the mayor has signed up to the government's rescue fund, or how much has been gathered in taxes this year.
The 2008 budget wasn't actually presented until 2010, and of its almost two million euros, around 70 percent went on wages for the town hall's 36 employees, along with four other civil servants, who are still on the payroll. The widespread belief in Cenicientos is that the mayor, like so many others throughout Spain, has been practicing pork-barrel politics. There are 1,600 eligible voters in the village. Most of them always vote for the same party. The group known as the undecided in the rest of Spain might well be called municipal employees in Cenicientos, says Luis Ramos of the local Socialist Party branch. He explains how the system of patronage works: "Around 40 grateful employees mean the votes of some 40 families. Elections here are won on less than 100 votes..."
Cenicientos' municipal employees say that the last time their employer fell behind on paying their wages - for five months - they received their full backdated salaries one week before the municipal elections. One employee summed up the tactics of the mayor: "Each month we would have to traipse up to the town hall, ask for a meeting with the mayor, and say to him, 'Enrique, pay us, please, pay us'."
One reason Cenicientos might be so indebted could be due to the high cost of staging the village's annual fiestas each August. The village lies in what has become known locally as the valley of terror. The name doesn't come from a reputation for kidnapping or murder, but from fiestas that attract some of the best fighting bulls. But a terrific bullfight doesn't come cheap. Last year's four days of taurine entertainment cost 80,000 euros, along with the expenses of other festivities and the organization. What's more, in a village of a little more than 2,000 people, there is a state-of-the-art bullring that seats 2,500.
Each month we had to traipse up to the town hall and ask him to pay us"
The village's bullring may be impressive, but many in Cenicientos say that they would rather have seen their money spent on maintaining social workers or carers for the elderly in the area - now they have to travel to the town of San Martín de Valdeiglesias, 30 kilometers away.
More jobs are to be lost in Cenicientos. Teachers at the infant school are to be laid off, as are cleaners. The mayor has just announced that the community is to shed 12 municipal jobs, among them those of José Ramón the garbage collector, María Dolores the cleaner, Ángel the messenger, and Marifeli the village registrar, all of whom were told in January that due to the village's accumulated debts, their services would no longer be required.
Most accept that the village can probably no longer afford to pay them, but they also wonder why they have been laid off, given that their wage bills are among the lowest, some of them amounting to little more than 400 euros a month. They also fear that they will not be paid any compensation. "There may be too many of us, but if they are going to give us the sack, then they should do so properly," says Rosa Montero, the infant school's concierge, who is one of those likely to lose their jobs. "It doesn't look like we're going to get any compensation," she adds.
For the moment they can only wait and see. They have not yet been told when their contracts will be rescinded. María Dolores says that the strain is becoming hard to bear. "It's been nine months now since we have been paid, and now we are being told that we are getting the sack."
We are being told that the debt is 3.6 million euros. We are sure it is bigger"
To make matters worse, it looks as though the mayor hasn't been paying his employees' social security contributions. The UGT labor union says that it has evidence that some 700,000 euros are owed by Cenicientos town hall in social security payments for its employees, which means that once the 12 are laid off, they won't be able to claim unemployment benefit.
Marifeli Puentes has been the village registrar for 26 years, and currently earns 600 euros a month. She feels a strong bond with the community, and is not only sad to be losing her job, but also wonders what the future holds for Cenicientos. At her small office in the town hall, there is a cabinet containing a ledger. It lists all of the deaths in Cenicientos for the last 150 years.
"Those people are our ancestors," she says. "After I'm gone, who will take care of all this?"
How the small town of Moraleja de Enmedio ran up 4,151 euros of debt per inhabitant
Moraleja de Enmedio is a village of some 4,700 souls, located halfway between Madrid and Toledo. On March 28 it announced a plan to pay off the 19.6 million euros it owes - that works out at 4,151 euros per inhabitant. In proportional terms, its debt is 13 times bigger than that of Madrid City Hall's, which amounts to 311 euros for every registered voter in the capital.
To pay off its debt, Moraleja intends to make savings in just about every sphere, including cutting the wages of its municipal employees - although it adds that this will be "a case of last resort."
The mayor says he intends to lay off all staff at the town hall, apart from his secretary. Municipal employees will also now be expected to perform duties previously outsourced to private contractors. At the same time, the town hall is to cut back on spending for what the mayor calls "non-obligatory" activities, such as funding arts events: "That could save us 300,000 euros a year," he says. Finally, the town hall says it is considering bringing its assorted departments back into the town hall, thus saving on rent; it is also thinking about selling properties it owns to raise funds.
The village of Guadarrama lies at the foot of the mountain pass of the same name, close to the monastery of El Escorial, in the northwest of Madrid. It owes its suppliers 3.6 million euros, which translates into a modest 240 euros per inhabitant. The current crisis is largely the result of a rescue plan that the town hall introduced five years ago to pay off debts of 31 million euros. The Popular and Socialist parties - both in opposition after Mayor Carmen Pérez del Molino fell out with the Popular Party (PP) and ran as an independent last year - two weeks ago halted plans to sign up to the government's bailout fund to apy suppliers. Pérez del Molino says that as a result, the village's coffers are empty.
"I don't know what will happen now," she says. "We can't pay our bills. We have asked for a meeting with the Economy Ministry. The opposition is to blame for this situation. But nobody understands," says the mayor, who claims that her former PP colleagues have opposed signing up to the government fund, saying that it would put Guadarrama under a decade-long embargo.
"But the reality is different," she argues. "We could pay off the debts to our suppliers in 10 years."
The Socialists justified their rejection of the plan, saying that the village is already in the midst of an adjustment plan. "Despite having been given 28 million euros recently, we are now being told that the debt is 3.6 million euros," they said. "We are sure that it is actually much bigger."
In Quijorna, a community of 3,000 people to the southwest of the capital, Mayor Mercedes García of the Popular Party says that she has already begun laying off municipal employees, although she won't put a figure on exactly how many, or how much has been saved. "We are trying to keep the layoffs to a minimum, but the current situation is far from good," she says.
Villalbilla, a village close to Alcalá de Henares, in the east of the region, owes a total of 11.1 million euros, which works out at around 1,000 euros per inhabitant. The new mayor, Antonio Barahona, an independent, blames the previous PP administration: "We have seen four years of budgetary chaos, of overspending, and lack of income due to a non-existent tax policy," he says on his blog.
San Martín de Valdeiglesias, in the southeast of Madrid, also faces severe financial problems, with debts of around eight million euros, according to Socialist mayor, José Luis García. He took over in last year's municipal elections, and also blames the previous conservative administration for "overspending." The PP outsourced the cleaning of municipal offices, paying a private company 300,000 euros a year. It then agreed to a 1.5-million-euro contract with a private company to take care of the town's gardens and roadsides. "There is no way that a town like this can pay that kind of money," says García.
The previous administration also installed an ice rink every year in the holiday season, which cost just under 100,000 euros each Christmas.
"In 2008 alone, the town hall spent more than 100,000 euros on catering and hospitality," says García. "One of these events cost 12,000 euros - it was to celebrate the reopening of the municipal theater. They even had a red carpet - it was like the Oscars."
In a bid to settle its debt of 18 million euros, El Álamo, a community of 7,265 people, located close to San Martín de Valdeiglesias, privatized the village high school with the backing of the Madrid regional education authority, but a recent High Court ruling overturned the bid.
