The Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands (TSJC) has temporarily suspended the provisional ordinance of uses of the General Plan in force, which dates from 2005, and which was approved Santa Cruz in January of last year with the aim of updating certain aspects of that planning. The expansion of the area for supermarkets to more than 750 square meters and the opening of city-hotels without the need for the plot in question to have tourist use in certain areas were the main innovations introduced by this now-suspended regulation.
The TSJC has thus agreed with the Government of the Canary Islands, which had requested this precautionary suspension until the contentious-administrative dispute that it has filed against the approval of the standard is resolved and in which it requests its annulment for lack of an environmental impact study .
From the Urban Planning Management, its manager, Guillermo Díaz Guerra, explained to DIARIO DE AVISOS that they are going to appeal this precautionary suspension since they understand that the technical reports from the Management, in which it was indicated that the environmental study was not necessary, endorsed the decision made, as well as that the arguments put forward by the high court on the central areas in which city-hotels are allowed to open, are not adjusted to what the norm establishes. And it is that the TSJC points out that the ordinance allows the physical reality of the plots in which the opening of city-hotels is authorized to be changed without the contribution of the environmental impact study.
According to the order, “the construction of new constructions on vacant plots or modifications can be foreseen in the abstract without prior demolition of other existing constructions, either through an intervention in the pre-existing construction, or through construction works or other installations or works that modify the physical reality of the site and that they will have circumvented the effect of the environmental assessment”. Hence the decision to temporarily paralyze the ordinance until “the true consequences of the implementation of the ordinance are not analysed,” he says.
From the Urban Planning Management it is pointed out that in a first analysis, this suspension does not affect any project that is currently in process supported by the aforementioned ordinance, although they do not know if there is any in drafting by a private promoter that was preparing it to present to Urbanism. The third aspect that updated this provisional rule of uses was to make the detailed uses of consolidated urban land more flexible, allowing its modification, something that the PGO of 2005 does not allow. These latter processes are also being reviewed.
demolition
As DIARIO DE AVISOS has learned, the Government of the Canary Islands has also appealed the ordinance that regulates the uses of the plot on which, at the moment, the demolition of the Paco Álvarez pavilion is being carried out for the same reasons: the lack of a study environmental.
