The Administration has defeated the illusion. In Motril, the pro-Three Kings parade association, organizer of the arrival of their majesties to the town since 1971, has taken a step back. After 53 rides, she is leaving tired of “the increasing technical requirements and the associated administrative burden,” as she wrote in a statement.
As Manuel Martín Muñoz, president of the entity for the last two decades, explains, they step aside due to the demands of the City Council, which makes them ultimately responsible for any incident that occurs. They say this is too much for them, even taking out insurance. “It is a great responsibility that we cannot assume,” they explain.
In exchange, the 15,000 euros that the City Council contributed in recent years – which was added to the money that the association was looking for under the stones – will now become 115,000. The parade on January 5 is organized and paid for by the town council.
The work of organizing the parade began for the association many weeks before Twelfth Night. They say that in November, for example, they settled “in some empty place in the center of Motril” that the City Council gave them and “it became a place of reference,” they say. “The children came to sign up as pages for the parade and we set up a Nativity scene.”
Before that, the search for financing had already begun. They raffled off a large Christmas basket with products donated by local companies, sold lottery tickets and visited companies to get them to donate money or candy. It was like this for decades. “During the good times, we distributed more than 20,000 kilos of candy,” Martín recalls by phone.
Everything has been going well for years, but in recent years, management and risk began to make the organization unaffordable. “They gave us a subsidy of 15,000 euros based on a report of all the activity around the parade, which generally exceeded 50,000 euros,” says Martín. He says that after giving them that help they demanded a penny justification for everything they did, not just public money. “In any case, in the end, we have always justified everything well,” he adds.
However, the trigger for the decision was the responsibility that the City Council placed on them. “They tell us that, as it is a nominative subsidy, we become organizers and, therefore, any accident or incident that occurs is our responsibility,” says Martín.
The president of the association complains that last year they spent 3,000 euros on insurance, but still they do not feel safe. “If something happens, the insurers will find ways to avoid paying,” he says. Until recently, they were not required to insure themselves because it was considered that municipal insurance covered everything. “The technical managers of the City Council have insisted that it is not and we cannot continue like this,” he concludes.
The council has put out a tender in the first months of this month to hire an entertainment agency to put on the parade, for a cost of 95,000 euros plus VAT that reaches 114,998 euros. Includes 19,400 euros for candy, in an amount that is not broken down 42,314 euros for floats and vehicles – which were previously obtained from volunteer tractor drivers who gave up their vehicle and the association’s floats –, 2,100 euros for the costumes of the kings and pages, 4,352 attributable to personnel costs or 6,000 euros for the self-protection, insurance and technical project.
This Thursday the bids submitted will be opened and there is not much time to lose before deciding which company will take charge of the parade. After all, there isn’t much more than a month left to have everything organized.
In a press call, Luisa García Chamorro (PP), mayor of Motril, thanked the association “for its work and its passion on the Most Magical Day of the Year, to keep the enthusiasm of young and old alive.” The mayor noticed that they were “very tired” and “the justification for the subsidy given by the Motril City Council was becoming more and more complicated.”
One year they had to return money, so the City Council, so that it would not cost them, extended the subsidy the following year to offset that loss from the previous one. García Chamorro has recognized that “there are technical issues here for municipal intervention and the truth is that it was becoming more and more complicated for this group of people, more and more requirements were being asked of them.”
Now, unlike with the association, which made each participating boy or girl pay 15 euros to cover expenses, being a child page will be free. Regarding the need to increase the budget, the mayor explained that “the City Council does not have floats, sound equipment or brass bands. “We would be irresponsible if we took all the maintenance area officials [a trabajar en la cabalgata] and stop fixing the streets. We understand that it is an essential service and it will be done through a service contract,” says the mayor.
Motril will have its parade like every year. And, although it is not at the price of other editions, the mayor assures that it is below similar towns such as “Roquetas de Mar, which spends 180,000 euros.” What is certain that the company will not organize is the previous atmosphere: the visits to the four residences in the town that the association carried out a few days before, bringing a small gift to each resident, or the Cavalcade of Illusion which Radio Motril Cadena SER performed every Christmas with the entity to raise funds for the parade in which businesses in the region have always donated products for auction.