Torrevieja Shelves Updating PGOU

[Carl]

https://www.informacion.es/vega-baja/20 ... 62308.html

Google translate, minus image:

Torrevieja shelves the procedure to renew its outdated urban development plan

The City Council withdraws eight years after awarding the contract for drafting the update of a plan dating back to 1986.

The Torrevieja City Council has put an end to the updating of the General Urban Development Plan (PGOU), which after 40 years has become the oldest in Spain for a city of more than 80,000 inhabitants.

The PP government team, led by Mayor Eduardo Dolón, who is also the Councilor for Urban Planning, inherited from the five-party coalition, in power between 2015 and 2019, the tender for the contract to draft the revision of this tool that sets the guidelines for growth and urbanization in a municipality known for some real estate excesses, especially during the brick boom.

The timeline of the case is also the chronicle of a death foretold. It was published in 2018 and approved by the local governing board in January 2019. Seven bids were submitted in February, and a year later the Procurement Committee proposed a contractor for the service — the joint venture formed by Incotec Consultores, Navarro Ballester y Asociados, and Ingenieros Consultores Técnicos en Medio Ambiente — with a completion deadline of over 40 months. In February 2021, the Comptroller General issued an unfavorable report, and in April, clarifications were requested from the technical staff. In February 2022, the Procurement Committee recused itself, referring the matter to the governing board — the last recorded action.

Continuous delays, unfavorable reports, and technical discrepancies left the project stalled and in an administrative deadlock, resulting in the invalidation of submitted bids. Despite this, the Popular Party maintained they were committed to awarding the contract, although in practice it was shelved. Outsourcing the drafting of a new plan to a private firm was not part of their initial plans. Updating the plan has not been a priority, based on the argument that it could hinder the continuation of construction activity.

Modifications

Meanwhile, the municipality's urban planning activity has continued as normal. However, this has been accompanied by the approval of numerous specific modifications — more than a hundred — promoted by the municipality and also in response to the interests of the real estate sector, the driving force behind the local residential tourism economy. The aim of these modifications is to update some outdated urban planning parameters within the framework of a general plan that was approved in December 1986 and came into effect in early 1987. It has undergone updates and legal validations in 2000 and 2018, although not the review stipulated by law.

Now, the local governing board has shelved an update that would limit urban development, since it would involve adapting the General Urban Development Plan (PGOU) to legislation that would no longer allow further expansion in width and probably not in height either.

He does so eight years after the review process began and after more than four years without a single document being moved, declaring "the urgency" to approve the withdrawal of the procedure for awarding the contract for drafting the revision of the PGOU, with the promise, a few months before the end of the term, to "process and study the possibility of a new plan".

In total, it has taken seven years, since the PP came to power, to resolve a tender that already had a proposed award to try to bring urban planning order to the municipality, in a city known as a paradigm of what should not be done from an urban planning point of view and with the challenge of taking advantage of the most important tourist housing stock in the country.

Meanwhile, the machinery continues to run, although missing the opportunity to have an updated urban planning tool for the orderly and sustainable development of the city with full legal certainty and based on current needs, avoiding improvisations and modifications that try to patch up specific demands.