We want to make Santander a more participatory city, we want to help you connect with your city,  and we want you to give us your suggestions, proposals and opinions, thinking about your neighbourhood and your city. We are committed to listening to you and continuing to improve for the people of Santander. That is why the City Council is drawing up a new Citizen Participation Plan that will make it easier for you to communicate with us and find out what the needs of the citizens are. 

Through the development of this new Participation Plan, we are going to provide you with new tools and mechanisms so that you can participate in the decisions of your city in a comfortable, simple way and from your home, without having to move. One of these mechanisms will be the Citizen Participation Portal, a new platform where your participation will be real and effective, which we will explain later.  

We will also be able to measure citizen satisfaction using satisfaction terminals with a simple survey that we will distribute at certain times in the city, and from which you will be able to evaluate the actions being carried out by the City Council.  

In order to draw up this new Citizen Participation Plan, we are going to involve different agents, both citizens, groups and associations, as well as areas of the City Council, in order to identify the needs of each of the parties and to be able to draw up a plan that favours the adjustment of municipal action in an effective way to these needs. 

In a first phase of analysis, we will study the current state of citizen participation and the municipal bodies for this purpose.  

We will then meet with municipal bodies, council areas, associations and groups to identify their needs and proposals for improvement in terms of citizen participation.  

Subsequently, all these requirements will be analysed in order to be able to develop and implement the Citizen Participation Portal effectively, responding to the requests and suggestions that the different participants may have in the development of this plan. 

Once all the information has been compiled, we will begin to draw up an action plan that will be the background to the Citizen Participation Plan, the route we will follow to respond to these needs and encourage your participation and involvement in the day-to-day decisions of Santander.  

The digital tools and mechanisms that we will include in this plan will provide you with a wide variety of functionalities so that your participation in the decisions of your city is as complete as possible, but no less simple or convenient.  

For the City Council it is very important to listen to you, to have a direct communication with you, so through these online tools you will be able to share ideas, suggestions, propose debates and we will even go a step further in your participation on where part of the participatory budgets are allocated, which we will explain later. From your City Council, we encourage you to participate and propose with initiative, thinking about your city.