The Calpe Town Council approved in the plenary session last Tuesday the rules that will govern the subsidies and grants for the promotion of cultural and / or artistic training. This is the first time that cultural training will be financially encouraged, as is already the case with sports training.
The subsidies will be aimed at public or private entities, associations and foundations, whether for music, dance, plastic or performing arts or any other cultural activity, to finance the expenses derived from cultural training. The activities will have to be carried out in the town of Calpe.
The aim is to subsidise any type of entity that has taken on cultural training as its own activity. The aforementioned subsidy, which will reduce the real cost assumed by the cultural entity, must have an impact either on the quality and quantity of services provided by the entity, or on the reduction of the fee paid by the student of the entity.
The subsidies must be allocated to the expenses borne by the cultural organisation and may not, in any case, alone or in conjunction with other subsidies, exceed the cost of the activity to be carried out by the beneficiary. The subsidies will be distributed among the beneficiary organisations in proportion to the justifiable eligible expenditure up to the limit of the budget appropriation.
In the debate on this point of the plenary both Defendamos Calpe and the Partido Popular pointed out that the subsidies should focus on reducing training fees and not so much on the aspect of the quality of the service, which is more difficult to quantify. Paco Quiles of Defendamos Calpe criticised the fact that one of the conditions of the bases is that the entities are obliged to collaborate with the Culture Council and requested the elimination of this paragraph from the bases.
For his part, César Sánchez of the Partido Popular asked for specific consideration to be given to the circumstances of families with more than one child and to those entities which carry out their activities in non-municipal facilities, with the consequent added expense.
The Culture Councillor for, Guillermo Sendra, explained that "the interested parties themselves have a good view of the criterion of improving the service, so why restrict the criteria, we can look at the economic aspect and also the quality". As for the condition of collaborating with the council, the councillor explained that the aim is to prevent the subsidised entities from abusing or committing fraud, misusing the facilities or counter-programming cultural activities.
Ximo Perles, from Compromís, pointed out that "since 2011 there has been no investment in cultural training, the training of sports entities is subsidised, but not that of cultural entities”.