Tactical urban planning, advertising and computers: the contracts under the magnifying glass of the Barcelona City Council


Beyond the masks, the tests and the nitrile gloves, the Barcelona’s town hall had to face the challenge of adapting the administration to the sudden confinement and the exceptional new normality as a result of covid-19, which entailed much more varied public spending than strictly health. The Court of Auditors and the Sindicatura de Comptes, the supervisory bodies, detected some deficiencies in contracting through the emergency route and questioned some of the express decisions of the consistory. “Without having detected any relevant anomaly to demand any type of responsibility,” municipal sources insist. These are the most outstanding contracts that were analyzed under the magnifying glass:

tactical urbanism

The council dedicated more than 12 million euros to public works and, of these, 8.4 million euros to tactical urbanism. This is, among others, the expansion of sidewalks in Via Laietana and the streets of Rocafort, Girona and Consell de Cent, as well as the traffic cuts on the sides of Avinguda Diagonal and Gran Via (3.86 million euros), the assembly and disassembly of Bicing stations (18,125 euros) and the increase in public space to be used for reopening of the terraces with the relaxation of anticovid measures (4.47 million euros).

An audit report from the Court of Auditors questions that some of the works, for an amount of 1.9 million, should be contracted by way of urgency because “although they may be related to the general health of people, they lack the immediacy in the response to the situation caused by the coronavirus”. The City Council defended in its arguments that these actions “had the purpose of guaranteeing public health in the movement of travelers through the city, guaranteeing, in turn, an efficient, healthy and sustainable movement” with the promotion of movement on foot, measures of security in public transport and “favoring the energy transition and shared private mobility”. The supervisory body considers that the latter “have no relation to the protection of people against covid-19, or may even be counterproductive for that purpose.”

Adaptation to telework

More than 4.7 million euros cost the adaptation of civil servants to teleworking between laptops, tablets, mobile phones and licenses. The contract for a higher value went to the company Saytel Computer Services S.A. which provided 741 fully equipped Toshiba A40 G-123 laptops for 781,870.82 euros, which means 1,055 euros per unit, an order for the month of June, without confinement. Seidor, the group to which this company belongs, had a turnover of 94.11 million euros in 2020 and earned 6.37 million. For the acquisition of the VPN platform to create a local network between users through the Internet, the Institut Municipal d’Informàtica (IMI) paid 299,974.85 euros to the company Unitronics Communications, S.A. on May 13.

Some of the purchases were also under the scrutiny of the Court of Auditors, which considered that, once the City Council was deconfined, it would take over 595 laptops, on September 28 and November 11, as well as 900 mobile phones and 10 tablets, the November 12, when “adequate contractual management planning would have made it possible to dispose of the computers through a less restrictive procedure.”

“The worsening of the sanitary conditions that led to the declaration of the second state of alarm could not be foreseen, so it was not possible to plan a contract whose need was not known, being at that time the only viable option to give a rapid response to the needs of citizens by municipal staff”, they justify from the City Council.

advertising campaigns

Another of the thorny issues according to the auditing body are the advertising campaigns (such as ‘BCN from home’ or ‘Reactivació Económica’) that cost a total of 3.8 million euros. The Court of Auditors assessed that the supporting documentation did not sufficiently detail “the immediate needs that needed to be met, nor the services contracted for this, nor the specific content of the communication messages”, although the City Council specified it in the allegations and tied the link with the pandemic . The Syndicate of Comptes He also kept an eye on these contracts and indicated that some did not correspond to the pandemic urgency. The consistory defended that spending on propaganda was not increased compared to other years and that there was a need to communicate information of interest to citizens about actions such as the economic, social and cultural reactivation of the city and about how the pandemic affects regular services provided by the City Council.

Related news

three companies (Havas Media Group, Zenith Medium Y Carat Spain) received a contract for more than 600,000 euros each between May 3 and 5 for the “planning and purchase of advertising services”. The first company signed another three on the same dates: one for 209,000 euros, another for 203,321 euros and the last for 100,000 euros on these same dates. “Since it could not be contracted via the ordinary procedure, the companies of the framework agreement that best suited the needs described were chosen,” they justify from the City Council.

On the other hand, the Court of Auditors also questioned whether the City Council contracted the services of the consulting firm KPMG, paying 107,616 euros for it, for advice on European funds. From the Court they emphasize that this “is not related to the immediate needs derived from the health situation.” The contract was signed on October 29, 2020 and the Government did not approve the Recovery Plan – detailing how and what it would spend the funds on – until April 2021. “The use of any other type of procedure would not have allowed to achieve in time the object of the contract, as was the urgent need to prepare the base document to be presented by the different actors in the ‘Spain Can’ plan”, they justify from the City Council. Sources from the consistory hide behind the fact that the Government’s forecast at that time was that “from January 2021” a series of calls linked to European funds would already be launched.


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