History can repeat itself. The Santa Cruz City Council is facing a possible cancellation of the Basic Adaptation of the General Management Plan (PGO) of 2005 that came into force when the justice of 2013 was annulled. And it is that the same company that overthrew the previous PGO has presented an administrative litigation against the Consistory requesting the challenge of the planning in force. As stated in the complaint, as DIARIO DE AVISOS has learned, the reason why Puzolana y Áridos, the plaintiff company, goes to court is the denial by the Municipal Management of Urbanism of Santa Cruz of a license for the construction of a residential building, premises and garages, with eight floors above ground, and four under it, in Ofra.
Urbanismo denies the license claiming that the current PGO does not allow such use on the plot in question, considering that it is unconsolidated urban land, and that it is within a unit of action still undeveloped. Precisely what is being challenged is that definition contained in the basic adaptation of 2005, the company presenting a report that occupies more than 40 pages, and in which it defends the erroneousness of this classification at present, and therefore requesting the challenge indirectly from the planning in force.
It so happens that the plot is in the same area as the one that led the company to denounce the previous General Plan, that is, in the vicinity of the Nuestra Señora de La Candelaria University Hospital, specifically, next to the unfinished road Ofra-El Chorrillo, another of the arguments of Urbanism to deny the license. The expert report that accompanies the complaint by Puzolana y Áridos emphasizes that the plot in question has all the characteristics of a consolidated urban land, from the urbanization of the surroundings to the water and electricity connections found in the street where The work is going to be built, so they understand that the refusal of Urbanism based on the plan in force does not conform to reality. And it is that, according to the arguments of the aforementioned company, a license had already been requested in 2018, even with the 2013 Plan in force, then the license was denied when submitting the application based on the planning of the year 2000. When they presented it again The PGO had already been annulled, and the current planning, the basic adaptation of 2005, entered into force. Then, the Management indicated that it could not report anything on the alignments and gradients of the parcel because it was on unconsolidated urban land. This last refusal is the one that took the company to court.
From the Municipal Management of Urbanism, its person in charge, Carlos Tarife, has confirmed to DIARIO DE AVISOS that he is aware of the presentation of this contentious-administrative matter. Asked the mayor for his assessment of this new setback for the planning of the city, he admitted that “this position, which he would call almost a warlike approach, has caused us a lot of surprise, especially if we take into account that it was the difference in interpretive criteria of a plot, what has already overturned the 2013 plan, and, honestly, it surprises me that history can repeat itself ”. Tarife assured that the Urban Planning Department “is going to respond with technical and legal criteria to this dispute, we are going to defend the interests of the city to its last consequences, although the most important part does not have to do with this stumbling block, which still does not have consequences, and it will not have them until the court, in the first instance, says if it is black or white, and on what it says, there will always be a possibility of appeal, so there will not be an immediate annulment ”. Likewise, the mayor recalls that “according to the times of the other time, it was in July 2017 when the first annulment sentence was given, and it ended up being final in October of last year, we are talking about three years.”
Tarife assures that “we have reasonable time to advance in the new General Plan, progress will be made between February and March 2022, and we hope that in 2023 the initial approval will be given, and depending on the volume of allegations, it would be approved in 2024 “.
The mayor of Urbanism insisted that “we are going to fight, but in parallel we have a very advanced work and Santa Cruz will have a General Plan that provides security and is not subject to issues like this.”
The councilor for Urbanism took the opportunity to recall that the current legislation is the one that allows complete planning to be canceled instead of giving the possibility of correcting what is considered erroneous. “At this point I have to remember the inactivity of the Government of Pedro Sánchez, by setting aside the project that the PP had prepared for a law at the national level so that the judges would have tools not to annul the entire planning and that when it is denounced that there is a part of the plan that is wrong, from plots, environmental issues or economic reports, they had a tool so that the part that is wrong could be corrected, and not for the courts to charge the complete planning because there is no other alternative ”.
“I ask the PSOE and we can, since they do not contribute anything new, they copy the ideas that the PP presented at the time, because they are for the benefit of a large population. About 16 million people live in cities where the General Plan has been canceled, and that suffers economic paralysis, because we have to work with older plans, modifications or provisional ordinances as Santa Cruz has done. In the Canary Islands, only 33% of the municipalities have their planning updated ”, he added.
Tarife concluded by insisting that “it is necessary to give instruments to the judges to avoid complete annulments, but also that a review be made at the parliamentary headquarters, and taking advantage of the La Palma crisis, so that the planning instruments are more agile”.
