April 8, 2022.
The Government publishes in the BOE Law 7/2022, on waste and contaminated soils for a circular economy. Behind this name hides a small bomb that has been exploding, little by little, in each municipality. In Madrid, that detonation has come this year. Beyond the calculation, there are thousands of car parks that are now wondering: do I have to pay the new garbage fee?
Where do we come from? My colleague Carlos Prego explained it a few days ago in WorldOfSoftware. Madrid has recalculated its garbage rate, making reference to the famous Law mentioned above with a calculation that the OCU has come to define as “original and unfair.”
The point is that controversy has arisen because the Madrid City Council said to “eliminate” this tax in 2015, alleging that they were removing the tax burden from the citizen. The 2022 Law obliges municipalities with more than 5,000 inhabitants to begin collecting it, following European guidelines.
To calculate this rate, the City Council has taken into account the cadastral value of the apartments or the tonnage of garbage collected in each neighborhood. That is, those who live in a neighborhood where more garbage is generated will pay more… and that directly affects neighborhoods with great tourist activity (hotels, tourist apartments…), commercial or very densely populated.
a truce. The criticism has been so virulent from the opposition, neighbors and consumer associations that the City Council has partially rectified it. They assure that now the number of registered residents in each home will be taken into account for next year.
But what happens where no one lives? Yes, where, for example, there is a parked car because we are talking about a garage. And the garbage rate also affects the owners of a parking space…
At least, apart from them.
and a battle. Because although the neighbors seem to have received a truce with the new calculation in the garbage rate which, yes, the City Council continues to defend that it will hardly have any obvious changes for the neighbors, the new open front is what happens with the parking lots.
And the door had been opened for a neighbor to have to pay a garbage fee for his home and another garbage fee for his parking lot. Despite the fact that, obviously, the garbage generated by a parking space is minimal or non-existent. Little more than general cleaning if we talk about a community parking lot.
However, the rate taxes the provision of the service of collection, transportation and treatment of urban waste, in the words of the College of Administrators. That is, the same person (house and garage) could be charged for a single garbage collection. Who pays then?
Those who will pay. Those owners of parking spaces whose parking is registered in the Cadastre as a “parking warehouse-industrial use”, in the words of a circular sent by the College of Administrators of Madrid to the Property Administrators of the Capital.
What does this mean? They clarify it from the Cadastre that, upon consultation with one of these administrators, they have confirmed that they are those independent garages that cannot be accessed from a home or from the common areas of a building. That is, those in which garbage is collected individually.
Those who will not pay. Those owners of a parking space whose parking is registered in the Cadastre as “residential use”. Or, in a simplified way by this last entity, those that are accessed from a home or from common areas with another building. In that case, they may be communities of different owners (garage and building) but if access is from the same common areas, the former will not pay the garbage fee.
What does the City Council say? That they adhere to the type of land use specified in the Cadastre and, therefore, that it is the latter that specifies who should or should not pay the garbage rate.
The only solution given in this case by the College of Property Administrators of Madrid is for the community to present a declaration of cadastral alteration to specify that the use of the land is residential and that it does not correspond to industrial use. The other alternative is to present a document for discrepancies with the description of the cadastral use.
Photo | Palo Kertis and Madrid City Council
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