The Casaverde Group will manage the “Residencial Villa de Catral” Senior Citizens Home, the largest such facility in the area, with a capacity of 264 residents. They were awarded the management contract, which will run for a period of 40 years, during the town council plenary meeting on Friday.
A spokesman for the company said that have earmarked an investment of 3.1 million euro to renovate the building and will hire 130 staff in the coming months, with the opening scheduled to take place in March 2020.
The process puts an end to a tangle of bureaucratic and legal procedures that have dragged on for a decade, since it was first built in 2008, and which have prevented the facility from becoming operational.
Two companies, Grupo Clave Sanitaria SL and Grupo Casaverde, submitted tenders for the management of the home. Casaverde now has a period of six months to carry out the works to refurbish the centre and is obliged to open to residents within nine months of signing the contract, which is expected to be formalised in the coming weeks.
In winning the concession, Grupo Casaverde will pay a fee of 30,000 euros per year to the municipality, in addition to assuming the Real Estate and other municipal taxes, which will mean an income of more than 34,000 euros a year to the municipal budget.
Following the bankruptcy of the original builder, who left unpaid hundreds of thousands of euros to small companies in the region, with this new contract, Grupo Casaverde has committed to outsourcing work valued at least 490,000 euros to merchants who were affected by that situation. The council say they hope that the opening of the facility will serve as an economic revival for the municipality of 8,000 inhabitants.
