The director of the La Laguna Town Planning Department and councilor for Territory Planning, Santiago Pérez, stated yesterday that the new proposal that CC will take to the extraordinary plenary session to be held tomorrow on disciplinary proceedings in the matter of town planning discipline “would end up benefiting the large offenders” and would affect almost 2,000 people, companies and entities.
A proposal that consists of “opening a file to fine each and every one of the offenders: citizens, companies and entities that have committed urban infractions,” he said. That is to say, that “in addition to opening an urban discipline file to protect legality (and which requires legalizing what has been built or demolishing it), also opening a sanctioning file whose purpose is to impose a fine on them.”
“If the resolution that they propose were executed -explained Santiago Pérez-, we would have to divide the resources of the Management in two, and from this loss of efficiency on our part, the great offenders would benefit, who are the ones who are primarily addressed by the current urban discipline policy that I formalized after a report from the Management services in an instruction. And there the initiation of fine files is not ruled out, nor the processing of files to the small offender, but priorities are established.
In addition, the councilor recalled that the CC proposal would affect almost 2,000 people, companies and entities, since between 2015 and 2019, in the CC mandate, a total of 1,026 urban discipline files were opened, and in the current one, already 898 have been opened. And he pointed out that “from 2015 to 2019 not a single sanctioning file was opened, like the ones they ask us to open now.”
Santiago Pérez also announced that if the Plenary “takes a favorable agreement on the CC proposal, I will put that agreement in the hands of the legal services of the Management”, because “I will not accept any order that alters the structure and functioning of the City Council and that implies a reduction of the attributions of the Management”, he argued.
CC Complaint
From CC, the group’s spokesman at the City Council and candidate for Mayor, Jonathan Domínguez, detailed yesterday that in this extraordinary plenary session it will be requested that any complaint about alleged urban planning infraction that enters the register of the Urban Planning Management be processed within the term of 6 months, as indicated by the Land Law.
Domínguez indicated that “we have requested this Extraordinary Plenary Session because we do not conceive that anyone who lives in this municipality is above the law, as unfortunately we are seeing with the person of the mayor of La Laguna and the president of the Parliament of the Canary Islands, both of the socialist party ”. However, he denounced that, “based on an instruction given by the head of the Urban Planning Department and councilman, Santiago Pérez, which is outside the legislation itself, he has decided that both assumptions are not a priority; which means that Santiago Pérez is giving his fellow party members a substantial advantage over the rest of the citizenry”.
They also denounced that the mayor has dismissed the nationalist councilor Fran Hernández from his position as president of the Citizen Coexistence Commission as “revenge” for not withdrawing the motion that gives rise to this extraordinary plenary session.
TF-5 variant
On the other hand, Santiago Pérez also made reference to another motion that CC will present to the ordinary session of the Plenary that will also take place tomorrow, and in which the paralysis of the project of the TF-5 variant is requested. The counselor defended again that the variant is not the first phase of the Via Exterior as CC says, as well as its important contribution “in relieving traffic jams” and to “solve the problem of planning and future development of the city”.
