The first of them is related to the construction of social housing in 2008 on private land, located in the center of La Camella that was never urbanized and, therefore, was not received by the municipality either. The second of the truncated operations has a more iconic character, since it refers to the ground on which the prefabricated modules of the IES de Guaza are located. The land is privately owned and the City Council undertook to requalify them in the General Management Plan (PGO) in exchange for occupying them. When the planning was annulled by the Justice, and it was not able to fulfill its commitment, the municipality is obliged to pay the rents generated since 2002, which amount to 1.39 million euros.
In the first case, the origin of this situation dates back to 2002, when the then government of Arona signed an urban agreement with the company promoting the so-called La Camella Baja Partial Plan, specifically the firm Wolding Estudio SL. By virtue of that agreement, the construction company ceded to the municipality a plot with a total area of 1,039 square meters, which corresponded to the 10% mandatory transfer that it had to receive.
On October 23, 2006, the Arona City Council signed an agreement with the public company Visocan for the construction of 35 social protection homes for young people, which also contained the same number of parking spaces. As part of the agreement, the previous plot was assigned for this, while the corporation assumed the commitment to remove all obstacles, so that the land would be urbanized and Visocan could make those homes available to users.
Disregarding legal services.
In September 2008, the Local Government Board granted the planning license for the construction of these houses, despite the fact that already on that date there was a warning from the legal services of the Urbanism area in which it was stated that the term granted to the developer to urbanize the area had ended in February of that year, without having carried out the acting. Despite this indication, the government group at that time went ahead with the project and granted permission.
When the houses finished being built and Visocan applied to the Arona City Council for a down payment on the water and electricity supply, he found the problem that it could not be granted, since, as the legal service warned, the urbanization had never been completed and, therefore, the houses could not be put up for sale, which led to a lawsuit in which the corporation was ordered to pay almost 2.7 million euros in compensation.
Prefabricated modules.
As for the IES de Guaza, a ruling obliges the Arona City Council to compensate the owners of the land that occupy the prefabricated modules, a situation that dates back to 2003.
On that date, the corporation signed an agreement in which it promised to requalify the land in the PGO to make it developable, in exchange for being able to use the land. The signed document itself established that, in the event that this PGO was not completed, it would be necessary to pay the income from 2002 onwards. Finally, that is what happened. First, in September 2013, when the PGO was declared void by the Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands (TSJC), sentence that was confirmed in July 2015 by the Supreme Court. The consequence for the municipal coffers will be the payment of almost 1.4 million.
The PP asks for “explanations”
The PP in Arona asks for explanations about the reasons that lead the City Council to pay 4.5 million euros in court sentences. The spokesperson of the PP, Águeda Fumero, censures that the government group announces that it will have to pay that amount in compensation for judicial sentences, “as a result of the ineffectiveness and incompetence in the management of a team broken in half, incapable of manage public resources ”. According to the popular ones, the City Council must pay 3.2 million to Visocan for not delivering the social housing of La Camella and 1.3 million to the owners of the lot where the IES Guaza barracks are located. In this social and economic context, “this money should be destined to help the aronera families who are having such a bad time in this crisis, instead of paying for the incompetence of this mayor.” The PP denounces that “is incompetence and the lack of management of the mayor of the municipality (the socialist José Julián Mena) condemns the City Council to pay 4.5 million euros by court order, as compensation for breach of agreements.” Fumero explains that during the finance committee held this Thursday, the councilor responsible for the area, Raquel García, pointed out the need to “provide credit for this mandatory payment, but in no case did she give explanations about the reasons that have made us reach this point”.
