Opinion. Mario Martínez Murcia Camera Orihuela, a tool for the future

A year after taking the reins of the Chamber of Commerce of Orihuela and a few months after a process of renewal begins in the board of directors of the entire Valencian Community I see myself in the need to explain what is the work we have put in March from a position that was not easy, and that still is not right now. The team of Cámara Orihuela that I am proud to lead has managed to get the institution out of the well in which it was sunk in October 2016, as it was then an institution in technical bankruptcy and close to its closure. We have already managed to put it back on the regional scene, we are present at the institutional level where we have to be, in Valencia, in Alicante, at the Miguel Hernández University … But above all, we have managed to be a tool for the future of our companies and, therefore, of our municipality.

Our Business Incubator bustles with activity, courses are held in its offices, projects are developed by entrepreneurs who have chosen our facilities to start their dreams, our staff has been prepared to serve trade and industry, we have recovered services and we are ready to evaluate the companies that want to obtain the SICTED. We defend the great infrastructures that should propitiate the development of our region, we want the Mediterranean Corridor more beneficial for our area, we have been in Madrid, in the Ministry of Development, defending the Logistic Activities Zone for the Vega Baja. We have implemented and brought to Orihuela the programs financed by the European Union for youth labor insertion, for women, sectors that concern us, and a lot, and we have all the cameral services underway.

But we still want more. We want to recover our activity in Orihuela Costa with the Local Antenna that until a few months ago served hundreds of companies and entrepreneurs on the coast. And not only of Orihuela, but of nearby municipalities that for convenience went there to request certificates or newsletters. We want to develop a project that our city needs, that of the Urban Shopping Center that has been running since 2012 and that was without effect last year. We want and claim an industrial estate that can be competitive and above all attractive for companies to want to settle, although in this sense the Generalitat and the City have already set to work, which we are happy.

We know that we are capable of putting all these projects in motion, including leading them from Cámara Orihuela as a speaker of what our companies need. But we can not do it without essential support like the economic one. I have already said on some occasion that the financing problems suffered by all the Valencian territory are accentuated in the Vega Baja to one thousand per thousand. We have everything to attract investment, but the sun and good weather are not enough. We need road, education and health infrastructures. And we need to be paid what is owed to us for work that has been done.

I think that we do not need to remember that this debt of around € 300,000 that has been maintained since 2010 by the City Council with Cámara Orihuela is a hindrance to our internal development that must be paid off and, among all of us, that Cámara Orihuela continues to be, more and more, a tool for the future of Orihuela, of the Vega Baja, of the province of Alicante and of the Comunitat Valenciana. A means that is increasingly useful for consolidated companies, for entrepreneurs, for our young people, for those who are here and for those who come behind, and that together we can put Orihuela in the place where it deserves and in which it does decades it should be.

Mario Martínez Murcia is president of the Chamber of Commerce of Orihuela