A mountain of rubbish in front of the Town Hall denounces the dirtiness of Llucmajor

PalmaThe facade of Llucmajor Town Hall began this Tuesday with a mountain of trash bags in front of the door. Household waste, cardboard, and other debris accumulated at the entrance of the Town Hall early in the morning, an image that encapsulates the main problem that has marked this legislature: a collection crisis that has been dragging on for years, worsened in recent months and that remains unresolved.

The bags have appeared coinciding with the celebration of the "quintos" (a local tradition), during which a town square has also been covered in toilet paper, a usual prank for this festival. A banner with the pun "Putmajor" has also been hung in the square, a direct reference to the dirtiness the municipality is suffering. The action has left one of the most explicit images of the crisis: the waste against which residents have been protesting for months has ended up accumulated at the door of the institution responsible for guaranteeing its collection. Municipal workers removed them first thing in the morning.

The protest comes just five days after the Llucmajor plenary session unanimously approved a motion to demand the declaration of health emergency given the accumulation of waste in public spaces. The initiative was presented by the PSIB, MÉS per Llucmajor, Llibertat Llucmajor and S’Ull, but in the final vote it also received the support of the PP, ASI and Vox, the three parties that make up the governing team.

The declaration of emergency would allow for urgent processing to contract an extraordinary reinforcement of collection and necessary disinfection services. The opposition had warned that the accumulation of waste, especially serious in El Arenal and in the urbanizations, causes bad odors and favors the proliferation of insects and rodents, to the point of representing, according to the four groups, a "serious risk to public health".

The main problem of the legislature

Waste management has become the major political problem of the mayor's term, Xisca Lascolas. The service's shortcomings are not new: the opposition places its origin in 2015, but points out that the situation worsened considerably in 2024, when the contract with the concessionaire FCC Medi Ambient ended.

Since then, the company continues to provide the service through an order of continuity. Opposition groups maintain that this formula does not guarantee the human and material resources necessary to ensure the collection of an essential service. At the same time, the procedure to award the new contract has not yet finished and, according to administrative deadlines, it will hardly come into effect before a year.

This situation has left the municipality trapped between an expired contract, a concessionaire obliged to continue providing the service, and a new award that offers no immediate solution. The latest episode arrived this summer, when the accumulation of bags in the streets pushed the opposition to demand a shock plan to be maintained until the new contract comes into force.

The conflict has also contributed to Lascolas's weariness. At the end of June, the PP mayor announced that she would not run for re-election in 2027, after 16 years in municipal politics. In the letter with which she communicated her decision, she acknowledged that this has been a "difficult and complex" legislature and that she had not always been right and had made mistakes, while defending that she had always acted with the general interest in mind.

Lascolas assured at the time that she would continue working "until the last day." Just over a month later, however, the main problem of her term remains open. This Tuesday, the crisis that until now was mainly seen in the containers of Arenal and the urbanizations has symbolically reached the door of the City Council.