The Consell's judicial infrastructure policy has become a puzzle of inconsistencies for municipalities governed by the left. While the Sagunto City Council demanded the immediate tender of its Palace of Justice in the last plenary session, the mirror of Xàtiva reflects a disturbing image: the Generalitat has just liquidated ten years of work in the capital of La Costera with an argument that, precisely, Sagunto has met from the beginning.
The Sagunto Palace of Justice project is not new. It was officially presented in February 2023 by the then councilor Gabriela Bravo and mayor Darío Moreno. At that time, it was announced as the largest investment in new construction within the Judicial Infrastructure Plan for the province of Valencia: 24.2 million euros (which the current budget already raises to 37 million) for a building of more than 10,000 square meters that was expected to come into service by early 2026.
The city has complied with all necessary procedures: land transfer with a plot of 10,761 m² in the future Avenida de les Corts, an expansion area on the outskirts of the city; building permit granted by the City Council in November 2024; and a clear social need, as the municipality is growing at a rate of 1,000 inhabitants annually and the judicial system is collapsed, especially with the arrival of the Volkswagen gigafactory.
Despite having the license and the peripheral land that the Generalitat now claims to prioritize, the promises of councilors Salomé Pradas and Nuria Martínez to tender the works «before the end of the year» or «in the coming months» have proven empty.
“"The decision does not respond to technical criteria, but to a political orientation that seeks to condition investments in municipalities with governments of a different sign than the Consell."
The paradox is absolute when comparing the situation in Sagunto with that of Xàtiva: the Generalitat rejects the Xàtiva project because it wants an external model, but keeps the Sagunto project, which is already on the outskirts, blocked. This «double standard» is costing citizens direct money. Sagunto has already had to spend 670,000 euros on temporary rentals for provisional courts. For all these reasons, the common front of PSPV mayors demands that Justice cease to be a tool for political confrontation and become the public service that the citizens of La Costera and Camp de Morvedre have been demanding for years.
While in Sagunto the paralysis is disguised as administrative delay, in Xàtiva the blow has been definitive. The Generalitat has formalized the reversion of the old Royal Monastery of Santa Clara, the property ceded by the consistory in 2022. The Consell's excuse for abandoning a building where a decade of technical management had already been invested is the application of Organic Law 1/2025, which supposedly advises seeking locations outside the urban core to facilitate communication.
