Public-private Collaboration in the Provision of Urban Services: Summary of the Debate.

The construction of the smart city inevitably involves collaboration between city officials, citizens, and the companies that operate within it.

This session of the Smart City Expo Congress 2013 includes the participation of officials from various Spanish public administrations, pioneers in the implementation of Smart initiatives, to learn in detail what the key factors are for success in public-private collaboration. Speakers:

• Concepción Gamarra Ruíz-Clavijo – Mayor – Logroño City Council.
• Carles Conill – Councilor – Barcelona City Council.
• Joan Carles Sánchez Salinas – Mayor – Sabadell.
• Íñigo de la Serna Hernáiz – Mayor – Santander.
• Moderator: Lluís Cases – Partner J&A Garrigues, SLP – Barcelona.

We leave you with some very interesting notes from the interventions of each of the speakers.

Concepción G. – Mayor of Logroño.

We are in a moment of change, which forces us to rethink our way of functioning from the administration, and the key lies in how agile and fast we are to establish new models of public management.

In Logroño, we focus the Smart City project from a framework of economic sustainability and continuing to provide services for a high quality of life. We have to talk about quality and transparency indicators.

But in addition, we must take into account two components in public-private collaboration. On the one hand, innovation in the provision of services, which forces us to review the classic contract models. And it is the private initiative that can lead this innovation. On the other hand, we must take into account the role played by the citizen, who no longer only asks us to be accountable, but wants to be a protagonist and active citizen in their city. We must introduce the assessment of citizens as one more vector to improve current public management.

As an example, in the transport of Logroño we are including quality indicators in the bidding processes for their evaluation.

We have to be fast, the legal tools exist, a cultural change of the administration is needed and that all of them are able to put them into operation, as well as clarify some legal aspects. But it should not involve a profound legal reform of the regulatory framework. However, the change is also in the change of the administrative organization. We must converge towards horizontal approaches of collaboration between departments, we move from a management of departments to management by projects with different departments involved.

This collaboration must integrate the management of the city, savings, and innovation in public services.

In public-private collaboration we must share the risks, and these must be assumed by those who can assume them and have more capacity.

Carles Conill – Barcelona City Council.

Presentation of the case of Aguas de Barcelona, Metropolitan Company of the water cycle of Barcelona.

The service presented is the service of water cycle management, from a global point of view, from supply to reuse of used water. The singularity is the public-private collaboration in the provision and management of this service.

We started with a company that historically managed the water cycle in Barcelona. What we have done is that the water purification infrastructures have involved public participation in 15% of this new society. It has been the most logical legal solution having been a service managed by the private sector for years.

The administration within this society is responsible for supplying the city according to the current regulatory framework.

AMB is a company of mixed public and private capital that was created to allow the sanitation of wastewater, the use of public investments and existing infrastructures, the financing and security of water supply to the metropolitan area of Barcelona.

Joan Carles S. – Mayor of Sabadell.

From Sabadell we understand technology not as an end, but as a means to put it at the disposal of cities that allow, not to make them smarter, but more habitable. It has to allow us more efficient, more transparent and more sustainable services.

The public-private collaboration materializes in Sabadell in a partnership in which 27 companies participate, with which we develop numerous experiences and we do it with different legal formulas already contemplated in the current Royal Decree Law of the Public Sector.

The different contracts in Sabadell end up being services very defined by the municipal services.

Sabadell as a medium-sized city of 200,000 inhabitants, and unlike others, we do not share the transfer to private initiative of the management of certain services, as they must be under the control of the public administration.

We are concerned about the management of databases in Smart Cities, it is necessary to define and specify who uses them and what they are used for, in such a way that we guarantee the privacy and security of these data.

Íñigo de la Serna. Mayor of Santander and president of RECI.

In the meeting of the board of directors of RECI this morning within the framework of the Smart City Expo 2013 everything has gone well until we have reached the point of public-private collaboration and the case of Guadalajara and its difficulties in bidding for packages of public services within its Smart City initiative has been exposed. Difficulties that have also been exposed for the case of Pamplona, Barcelona and Santander.

We are faced with problems of interpretation of the Contracts Law from the Intervention and Secretariat services of the administration to fit the Smart initiatives that we are proposing.

The private sector must find a stable market to continue evolving and from RECI (The Spanish Network of Intelligent Cities) we offer access to the cities that make it up.

We must establish a standardization and establish the rules of the game in smart cities, and it is a success that the commission has brought forward the single platform within the Fireware project.

But another question is that it is necessary to specify the business model, and go beyond the implementation of sensors, we must question the viability of the systems and infrastructures deployed in smart cities. It is imploring that companies find that niche of opportunity that public administrations are generating. European funds give us a breath of oxygen, but the important thing is to enable urban laboratories that generate stable environments to experiment with new services, with new business models.

The risk we have is in a Contracts Law that does not fit the needs of Smart Cities, but also, in an inaction of the Spanish civil service system that prevents change for various reasons (inefficient routines, lack of a stable regulatory framework…)

There are certain legal uncertainties that we must resolve, and for this, together with Garrigues and the ETSI, we are working on a more complete document that allows us to make a proposal to modify the Contracts Law.