Mayor Ignacio Gramún celebrated that it was a "historic day" for the city because it solves "a problem that has been entrenched for more than 30 years."
Fraga, December 28, 2023 – The Fraga City Council unanimously approved in its extraordinary plenary session this Thursday the modification of an existing agreement and the signing of a new one to ensure that the Fondo de Litera industrial park discharges its wastewater into the treatment plant at the PLFraga logistics platform. With the signing of these two agreements – the first with Suelo y Vivienda de Aragón (SVA) and the second with the PLFraga Business Unit (EUC) – the wastewater discharges from the industrial park can be properly managed, resolving an environmental problem that the city has faced since the first companies established themselves in the Fondo de Litera industrial park in the 1990s.
The mayor of Fraga, Ignacio Gramún, celebrated that “today we are putting an end to a serious problem that has been entrenched for a very long time.” He also indicated that “perhaps many residents of Fraga are unaware of this problem, but for more than 30 years, since the first companies were established in the Fondo de Litera industrial park, the wastewater from that park has been discharged without treatment.”
To resolve this issue, the City Council has reached an agreement with SVA and EUC PLFraga that will allow the acquisition of connection rights and thus enable the treatment of wastewater from Fondo de Litera at the PLFraga WWTP.
On the one hand, the amendment to the agreement with SVA includes a 33% increase in the maximum discharge flow from Fondo de Litera to the PLFraga wastewater treatment plant. This flow, agreed upon and signed in May at 382 m³ per day, will now reach 514 m³ per day. This ensures the necessary flow for the discharges from the Fondo de Litera industrial park and its future expansions. Furthermore, the Fraga City Council will become the holder of the discharge permit from the Ebro River Basin Authority, which until now belonged to the PLFraga Consortium.
In return, the Fraga City Council will pay SVA almost one million euros, an amount equivalent to what the part of the WWTP that will be used to treat the wastewater from Fondo de Litera cost at the time.
On the other hand, this initial agreement with SVA was contingent upon the signing of another agreement with the EUC PLFraga to share the use of the wastewater treatment plant. This agreement was approved at Thursday's plenary session after weeks of negotiations with the business owners. Through this agreement, the Fraga City Council will assume responsibility for managing the wastewater treatment plant, cleaning the streets and green spaces, and supplying electricity for the public lighting of the PLFraga logistics platform—a demand that the business owners at this platform had been making for years.
Furthermore, Gramún pointed out that, “since then, a series of events have occurred that have affected the City Council, such as sanctioning proceedings and even the opening of preliminary investigations by the Prosecutor's Office for environmental crime, all against the Fraga City Council.”
Regarding the history of this problem, the mayor stated that "all mayors, to a greater or lesser extent, have worked to solve one of the most important problems this city had, although it was never possible to reach a successful conclusion and it has never been successful."
“With the improvement of this agreement, we are putting an end to a long-standing environmental problem that the City Council, I reiterate, has been dealing with for more than 30 years. Today, we should all be proud; this governing team and the City Council's technical staff have worked intensively within their respective areas of responsibility, and ultimately, this work will benefit the entire community of Fraga,” Gramún concluded.
