The Arona City Council and the public company Visocan have agreed on the roadmap that they will follow in the municipality with the 2.7 million euros of compensation that the corporation has had to pay to this entity as a result of the court ruling derived from an agreement urban development signed in 2006 and whose license dates from 2008, with the previous Government group. These funds, as agreed by both parties, will be used for investment in public housing.
The conversations held by the mayor, José Julián Mena, with the CEO of Visocan, Agustín Fernández, together with the councilor for the Housing area, Leopoldo Díaz Oda, and the managing director of this public company, Víctor González, have concluded that the first The epicenter of the actions will be El Fraile, a nucleus in which there is a building owned by a bank and whose tenants were rented under advantageous conditions.
Both the municipality and Visocan have agreed to analyze the economic and legal viability of its acquisition to use it for the same purpose, with affordable rents, a short-term step that seeks to continue with the same objective in other parts of Arona, with the purchase of homes in the hands of private entities to give them a social use. In the long term, both entities propose the signing of an agreement that allows the expansion of the public housing stock.
The mayor of Arona explained that “it is essential that the resources of the municipality not only pay for the previous mismanagement, but give them a use that results in the common good. In this case, it is necessary to highlight Visocan’s goodwill to allocate the money from this compensation to meet the needs of the aroneras and aroneros with scarce resources or low salaries and who are in an environment of high rents. People are the priority of this government. At El Fraile we want to take a first step to go further in other nuclei of the municipality ”.
The councilor for the Housing area recalled that “we are immersed in carrying out the first process of regeneration and rehabilitation of public housing in the history of Arona in Virgen del Carmen, Guargacho. Our intention is to follow this line and expand the municipality’s social housing stock with Visocan, who has shown a great willingness to work together, “he added.
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, called Wolding Estudio SL. By that agreement, this ceded to the municipality a plot of 1,039 square meters, corresponding 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 and the same number of parking spaces. In that agreement, the previous plot was assigned for this purpose and the corporation assumed that it would remove all obstacles so that the land would be urbanized and Visocan could make those homes available to users.
In September 2008, the Local Government Board granted the urban planning license for the construction of these, despite the fact that already on that date there was a warning from the Urban Planning Legal Area in which it was stated that the term granted to the developer to urbanizing the area had been completed in February of that year without this having been done. However, the government group at that time went ahead and gave permission.
When the houses were finished and Visocan requested the Arona City Council to attach the houses to water and electricity, this could not be granted, since, as the legal service warned, the urbanization had never been completed and, therefore Therefore, these 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.
