The Arona City Council confirmed yesterday that it will have to pay 4.1 million euros for two convictions as a result of failed urban operations on private land that date back to 2002 and 2006, in which the Canary Islands Coalition was in charge of the Municipal government: the construction of social housing in La Camella and the non-payment of the rent of the land occupied by the IES Guaza.
In the first case, the City Council signed an agreement in 2002 with the promoter of the La Camella Baja Partial Plan (Wolding Estudio SL) by which a 1,039 square meter plot was transferred to the municipality, corresponding to a mandatory 10% transfer. In October 2006, the Consistory signed an agreement with the public company Visocan to build 35 social protection houses with garages on said plot.
As reported by the City Council, in September 2008, the local government granted the urban planning license, despite the fact that the legal services warned that the term granted to the developer to develop the area had expired seven months earlier. When the houses were finished and Visocan asked the City Council to hook them to water and electricity, this could not be carried out, since the urbanization had not been completed and, therefore, they could not be put up for sale, which led to a dispute that has just been resolved with a sentence that condemns the payment of almost 2.7 million euros by the City Council.
The second case dates back to 2003, the year in which the corporation signed an agreement with the owners of the land that occupies the prefabricated modules of the IES Guaza, in which it undertook to requalify the land in the General Urban Development Plan to turn it into developable, in exchange for being able to use the land.
The document established that, if the PGOU did not go ahead, the City Council would pay the rents from the year 2002, as it happened after the Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands, in 2013, and the Supreme Court, in 2015, declared null in General Plan. The consequence for the municipal coffers will be the payment of 1.4 million euros.
Popular Party
The spokeswoman for the Popular Party of Arona, Águeda Fumero, yesterday asked for explanations about the reasons that have led the City Council to pay more than 4 million euros in compensation for judicial sentences. Fumero attributed this situation to the “incompetence and lack of management” of the current government team.
“Now we are the Aroneros who have to pay more than 4 million euros out of our pockets because this Government has been more aware of its political battles than doing its job,” said the spokesperson for the popular Aroneros, who reproached the councilor of the Treasury, Raquel García, of “not giving explanations about the reasons that have made us reach this point.” In Agueda Fumero’s opinion, it is a “new example of the lack of transparency that characterizes the minority government of José Julián Mena.”
