The Contentious-Administrative Chamber of the Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands has dismissed the appeal filed by the Tías City Council and the Golf Puerto del Carmen Compensation Board against a previous ruling that annulled the occupation of the property of José Antonio Levas, a resident of Puerto del Carmen whose land was occupied and his house demolished in January 2006 because it was within the Partial Plan of the Golf Course of the tourist town.
The chamber explains why the ruling of that first sentence against the Tías City Council and the Golf Puerto del Carmen Compensation Board was correct. The first thing it says is that the agreement by which the Tías City Council declares on April 11, 2005 the urgency of occupying the land and facilities of José Antonio Levas is not its responsibility but that of the Council of Ministers or the Governing Council of the autonomous community, so the Consistory violated, according to the ruling, article 52 of the Law of Forced Expropriation. A year earlier, the City Council had already made the same declaration of urgency for the expropriation of the rest of the properties that were within the golf course area.
José Antonio Levas's property had been left out of the expropriation file "by mistake" and was not part of the owners who had their properties within the perimeter of the Golf Course Partial Plan and who, either had joined the Compensation Board of the field, which offered them 4.70 euros per square meter expropriated, or had not accepted it and a joint appraisal procedure was being carried out with them. There were five owners who did not agree with the appraisal of the Compensation Board, filed a lawsuit and managed to get the Forced Expropriation Jury to raise it to 35 euros per square meter in March 2006.
The chamber says that in the case of José Antonio Levas, the administration that expropriated him should have compensated him, obliged to carry out a complementary expropriation file and equal to that followed with the rest of the owners who did not adhere to the Compensation Board, but this procedure was not done and with José Antonio Levas the joint appraisal of the value of what was expropriated was not applied.
This expropriation file should have been submitted to the approval of the Provincial Urban Planning Commission, an body that can declare the urgency of the occupation of the affected goods and rights, not the City Council. But the Tías City Council, according to the ruling, did not follow the two steps of the procedure (expropriation file and approval of the autonomous administration), but "has merged the procedure into a single phase".
"It attributes to its own agreement the effects of the declaration of urgency, continues the chamber, so it estimates that "at this point its annulment proceeds, which drags that of the successive acts dictated". Those successive acts included the expropriation of the 6,000 square meter property of José Antonio Levas and the demolition of his house in January 2006, for which the Compensation Board offered him 27,000 euros, a much lower amount than that claimed by Levas, which amounted to 480,000 euros. That day he was evicted from his house by the Local Police of Tías by judicial order.
Since then José Antonio Levas has been living in a rented apartment in Playa Honda. He received notification of the ruling this Wednesday afternoon and is satisfied because the opinion "proves him right" and certifies that he can "go to the property and put up even a tent there".
