The special section with jurisdiction in cassation matters of the Contentious-Administrative Chamber of the Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands (TSJC) will clarify which administration can impose fines for urban planning violations after having admitted an appeal from a company sanctioned by the Agency for the Protection of the Urban and Natural Environment (Apmun) in the face of doubts about which body is competent.
Specifically, according to the Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands, an autonomous cassation appeal has been admitted against a ruling by the Second Section of the same body in its headquarters in Las Palmas, which on March 16, 2018, confirmed a fine of 3,000 euros imposed by the Agency for the Protection of the Urban and Natural Environment (Apmun) on the company Canguro Las Palmas for the expansion of a building on rustic land with natural protection in Gran Canaria, specifically in the municipality of Vega de San Mateo and in the Natural Protected Area called Protected Landscape of Las Cumbres C-25.
What the chamber with cassation powers accepts (what could be called the Canary Islands Supreme Court, a body created in 2017 in accordance with the reform of the jurisdictional Law), is to debate and resolve which administration is competent to initiate, instruct and resolve sanctioning proceedings in matters of urban planning discipline, since currently the regulations seem confusing.
And it is that the town councils are responsible for infractions against urban planning, the island councils for infractions in matters of environmental protection and the management and conservation of Natural Protected Spaces whose management has been attributed to them, the Agency for the Protection of the Urban and Natural Environment when the infractions are serious or very serious and the Town Council and the Island Council have not initiated proceedings, and again the Apmun when in the same case there are alleged infractions of municipal or island competence and of the APMUN.
The resolution will have the character of Supreme Court jurisprudence
The order admitting the appeal points out that the greatest difficulty regarding competences lies in their distribution between the town councils and the Agency.
The court specifies that the issue that presents objective cassational interest for the formation of jurisprudence is to determine the competence to initiate, instruct and resolve sanctioning proceedings in matters of urban planning discipline of the different administrations, in accordance with Legislative Decree 1/2000, of May 8, which approves the Consolidated Text of the Laws on Territorial Planning of the Canary Islands and Natural Spaces of the Canary Islands, and also identify as legal norms that in principle should be subject to interpretation, articles 190, 202, and 229.2 of said Legislative Decree. The resolution issued by the chamber will have the character of Supreme Court jurisprudence.
