A Plan for the future of Arrecife and a Law for the future of the Canary Islands

May 30 2016 (10:36 WEST)

We are at a key moment to define the future of the capital of our island. Arrecife urgently needs to have its General Planning Plan, since it is the only way to improve the quality of life of our citizens and attract investments to the city.

The road is not being easy, and it is taking longer than I, as a resident of Arrecife and as head of the Department of Urban Planning, would like. What's more, I am aware that the final document will not be what all the residents of Arrecife would like, but it will be the one that will most benefit the residents and the city.

That is why we are fighting, trying to find solutions that satisfy everyone. Solutions that must be within the law, that is taken for granted.

Thus, the planned planning will be the result of the meetings we have held with the owners of land plots and, although it is true that agreements cannot be established with all of them, those that are made will have to have a general interest for the municipality of Arrecife.

We are talking about the need for orderly planning to provide a future for a city, but our vision and our perspective must be much broader. And it will be the future Canary Islands Land Law that will help us to democratize, to free up urban planning, that is, to stop it from being in the hands of a privileged few.

I will not say that it will solve all the land management problems in the Canary Islands, because that would not be true; but it will be an important step forward in order to clarify the regulations and speed up viable projects. In fact, we must not forget that it is the result of a diagnosis shared by the social and economic agents of the Canary Islands.

One of the objectives of the Land Law is to eliminate one of the phases in the processing of general plans, the initial approval phase, and to make the procedures very simple.

Therefore, it will no longer be the Government that definitively approves a General Plan or an Island Plan, but the processing and approval will fall exclusively on the town councils and island councils, respectively.

This does not mean, however, that the guarantees of legality are reduced. Simply, the control remains in the hands of each responsible administration: local, island or regional. It is a principle of regulatory efficiency, with full legal guarantees.

The Canary Islands have been suffering from legal uncertainty for two decades, delays in investments and general plans that take so long to be approved that the reality of the moment has nothing to do with what it was when the process began.

The time has come for all this to change. If we want to move forward, we have to bet. And the objective is to achieve a law that reorganizes and simplifies the procedures of Urban Planning; that shortens deadlines to speed up decision-making in matters of investment and facilitates the investment of land already classified as urban or developable. A law that speaks of quality and not quantity, without consuming more land and with full legal guarantees.

Samuel C. Martín Morera, Candidate for CC-PNC Lanzarote to the Congress of Deputies

 

 

 

Most read