TG Shocked at Disproportionate Cost and Mismanagement of the Midtown Park Project

Following inquiry in Parliament by GSD MP Elliott Phillips, Minister John Cortes disclosed the costs of construction (so far) of Midtown Park, which stand at over 3.77 million pounds.

Together Gibraltar believes that the disproportionate cost of this park is the final straw in a saga that has been an example of hypocrisy and poor management of public funds from inception. It also shows yet again that the Government’s “Green Gibraltar” agenda was little more than a sticker on an old diesel van.

 In order to provide a reference, let us start by quoting research performed by the UK Government’s green space watchdog, Cabe Space, that describes the two top price tiers as follows:

 TIER A – More than £200/m2, high cost intensive use urban parks with a high proportion of paving, structures and water features, numbers of buildings and high levels of intensive horticulture requiring high quality management e.g. Paris parks or the two Chicago examples, usually on redevelopment land.

TIER B - £100-200m2 for medium cost parks involving high intensively used spaces and high level maintenance but tending to be smaller than A.

 Let’s part from the very generous premise that Midtown park would be considered a tier A or B park by Cabe Space, which is already a very dubious proposition. As it stands, the park has cost the Gibraltarian taxpayer roughly £790/m2. This is a mammoth over-cost, several orders of magnitude greater than the most spectacular and well-equipped parks in the UK. Even if we go by the Minister’s figures, where he details the cost of removing the power plant machinery and polluted soil at £640k, this leaves an enormous budget of over 3 million pounds, a third of which should have been enough to build a pretty basic infrastructure such as Midtown park. To top it all off, works in the park are still going on, which probably means that further costs will be added to the 3.7 million. Minister Cortes’s referral to the costs as being “to date” also points to this possibility.

 As for the park today, it is far from being the lung promised in the 2019 GSLP manifesto.  The manifesto promised 80 mature trees, while only 47 have been delivered. To top it all off, almost half of the surface of the park is paved.

 TG Party Chairman Craig Sacarello said: “In order to understand the overspend in this disastrous project, we would like Government to disclose the costs in full, as well as the details of the tender process and the organisation chart of all companies involved in its construction. The people of Gibraltar are demanding to know why and how this reckless overspend has happened. As for the Government’s green agenda, the government need not disclose any further. 

 The whole of Gibraltar has already seen that it is nothing but a façade of empty promises.”