The war between the municipality of Villa Carlos Paz and the Integral Cooperative (Coopi) opened a new battle scenario after the criminal complaint filed by the local Executive regarding an alleged leak of untreated sewage fluids from the Costa Azul neighborhood sanitation plant.
The sewage service is the last bastion that the Integral Cooperative maintains after the municipality won a long judicial struggle for the drinking water service that the institution had provided for six decades and whose concession the municipality withdrew.
In any case, the Superior Court of Justice has in its hands the decision on what will happen to this service, but a precedent for the final decision was glimpsed in mid-2022 when it rejected an amparo filed by Coopi and ratified the authority of the municipality over sewers in the city.
Now, the mayor Daniel Gómez Gesteira confirmed that a criminal complaint was filed against the technical managers of the Costa Azul sewage treatment plant because “high rates” of sewage contamination were found in the San Roque reservoir.
“They are rotting our lake repeatedly and constantly,” said the mayor and listed works being carried out by the Province in the city and in the region to clean up that lake. The San Roque has decades of severe environmental deterioration, with high contamination of its waters. All evaluations have found that the main cause is insufficient sewage treatment throughout the basin.
“Carlospace people are working seriously to care for the lake, managing sewage works throughout the basin, investing billions of pesos in works in the city and we find that, once again, Coopi is throwing sewage into the lake “, held.
As reported by the municipality, analyzes were carried out in the Costa Azul area, from where the liquids treated at the plant are returned to the lake, and high levels of sewage contamination were found.
“It is a very serious situation because those who are contaminating the lake today are the same ones who, charging for them, did not do the sewer works,” said Gómez Gesteira and again charged the inks against the entity that has provided the service since 2007, the year in which the Costa Azul plant was inaugurated (with national funds).
“They are the same ones who are charging double the sewer rate with the capitalization and never made an investment, the same ones who refuse to provide the sewer service, believing themselves to be owners, in the same way they did with water,” he said. . He also took the opportunity to attack “political candidates” of the local opposition, treating them as “accomplices.”
Gómez Gestiera is mayor for a neighborhood party allied at the provincial level to Hacemos por Córdoba.
Background
In 2019, the then mayor Esteban Avilés, of the same political color as Gómez Gesteira, filed a complaint with similar characteristics accusing the Integral Cooperative of dumping “more than 10 million untreated liquids into the lake.”
This Monday, from the Executive it was clarified that there was another expanded complaint in 2021 with alleged overturning in the Bahía del Gitano area. Legal adviser Darío Pérez said that everything arose from testimonial versions of plant employees. “Professionals from the Ministry of Environmental Urban Development carried out the studies that confirmed irregular and deficient management of sewage treatment,” said the official.
The complaint was made at the Second Shift Prosecutor’s Office in charge of Ricardo Mazzuchi.
Unanswered
When asked by The voicedirectors of the Integral Cooperative expressed their decision not to make statements about this new complaint that was filed from the municipality.
Sources close to the entity assured that the proximity of the elections for the mayor, which in Carlos Paz will be on Sunday June 25, is one of the reasons to revive the fight between the local government and Coopi.