- The new site on Garibai Street will improve the attention to the citizens and transfer most of the public services of the Government to the center of San Sebastián, very close to the rest of Basque institutions
- Denis Itxaso explains that it will be possible to liberate a wing of the current building of the Subdelegation in Plaza Pio XII “and in his case we would try to reach a sales agreement with the City of San Sebastian to facilitate responding to the demand for cultural services of the neighborhood of Amara, as he has been demanding in recent years”
The Government delegate in the Basque Country, Denis Itxaso, today presented the project to locate the headquarters of the Government Subdelegation in Gipuzkoa in the former building of the Bank of Spain, in the central Garibai Street. As Denis Itxaso explained, “the objective of the comprehensive study already carried out and whose execution will be financed through the successive General Budgets of the State, is to finalize in 2030 the necessary reform of the building for the transfer of personnel and some of the services currently provided in the headquarters of Pius XII as well as other services that are currently located in other premises disseminated by the city.”
As explained by the government delegate, “the new headquarters will house the subdelegate and his team, the General Secretariat, Agriculture, Industry and Labor (office of foreigners). In addition, it will host other services such as the Salary Guarantee Fund, the Muface Service and Foreign Trade, now in other premises scattered around the city that will either be sold or will not be rented.”
The current headquarters in Pius XII would remain as a secondary building of the subdelegation and would continue to house some services such as the Center for International Vaccination, Health (drug laboratory), AEMET and Coastal Demarcation. However, as Denis Itxaso explained, it will be possible to free a wing of the current building of the Subdelegation in Plaza Pio XII “and in his case we would try to reach a sales agreement with the City of San Sebastian to facilitate responding to the demand for cultural services in the neighborhood of Amara, as he has been demanding in recent years.”
In this way, and with the reference of the current workforce, approximately half of the 82 employees based in the current subdelegation of the Government would move to the new headquarters of the Bank of Spain. To these 41 people should be added the employees attached to the Salary Guarantee Fund (9), those of Muface (7) and those of Foreign Trade (8). In total, 65 people. In the current sub-delegation, therefore, about 40 people would remain.
The transfer of the subdelegation of the Government to the Bank of Spain, in addition to improving the service to citizens, represents a patrimonial benefit for the city. The property, of neoclassical style, was inaugurated in 1881 and occupies an area of 3,000 m2. Its suitability as a Subdelegation and the result of the reforms will help consolidate and recover an important building in the history of the city.
Citizens will be able to speed up their efforts significantly. Apart from the reunification of the central government services dispersed throughout the city, the old building is just 300 meters from the Town Hall, 200 meters from the Provincial Council and 350 meters from the Basque Government delegation.
This transfer already has some precedent, as was the regrouping in the old Customs of the Port of Bilbao of different services that the General Administration of the State provided in Bizkaia. The new building was recovered in 2021 after more than four years of work and an investment of more than nine million euros. As is now intended with the transfer of the Subdelegation of Gipuzkoa to the building of the Bank of Spain, the new units then represented a concentration of services offered by different administrations especially beneficial to the citizens.