The Valencian Government chaired by Carlos Mazón announced on December 30 the approval of a decree law that contemplates urgent urban planning measures to facilitate reconstruction tasks after the flood.
As reported by the Consell, through this decree law, the Generalitat will be able to process special urban reconstruction plans aimed at creating and organizing land to build homes, as well as relocate industrial or tertiary estates, integrate the infrastructures that are necessary and, for all purposes , facilitate reconstruction tasks.
As a novelty, they commented that the new regulations introduce the figure of the special urban reconstruction plan as a flexible planning instrument with urgent processing aimed at promoting the obtaining of final land to build homes or industrial estates and promote, with the urban planning determinations that result necessary, reconstruction tasks.
The decree was published this Thursday in the Official Gazette of the Generalitat Valenciana (DOGV) and is applicable exclusively in the municipalities affected by DANA. The document includes other issues that cast doubt on its real usefulness to improve the times of urban planning procedures and above all on the necessary change of paradigm that a disaster of the magnitude of the DANA that caused 223 deaths in Valencia would require in urban planning matters.
For starters, he claims that reports of Mazón’s star signing to lead the reconstruction, vice president José Gan Pampols, will not be definitive. Specifically, according to point four of article two of the decree that regulates the aforementioned special reconstruction plans, “the deadline for issuing regional and local sectoral reports will be 10 business days, including a mandatory and non-binding report from the Second Vice Presidency. and Department for the Economic and Social Recovery of the Valencian Community”.
Furthermore, article four allows the city councils of the municipalities affected by the DANA “to implement newly built residential housing on vacant, unexecuted municipal lots, classified as equipment.” The City Council will then have a period of three years to enable the lost endowment land in another area as compensation.
According to article six of ‘Special rules in relation to the repair, restitution or reconstruction of buildings’, in basic urbanized land “it may be repaired, restored or reconstructed, even with structural alterations, legally established buildings and constructions damaged by the DANA, although they are in a situation outside of planning in municipal urban planning.” In this way, while under normal conditions buildings that are out of order cannot be subjected to structural reforms and only minor maintenance repairs can be applied to them, in this case they can be rehabilitated.
On the other hand, it adds that “when the complete reconstruction of the building is to be carried out, the conditions of adaptation of the buildings and urbanization established in Annex I of Decree 201/2015, of the Consell, Plan of Territorial Action for Flood Risk Prevention of the Valencian Community (Patricova)”.
Finally, the transitional provisions suspend any urban planning procedures in the municipalities affected by the DANA on the lands considered floodable by Patricova, something that Patricova himself already prevented de facto. Furthermore, it extends this suspension “until such time as a runoff report issued by the basin organization on the risk of flooding is incorporated into said procedures, assessing the consequences of said runoff.”
This measure collides with the administrative simplification decree approved by the PP and Vox a month after the DANA, by which sectoral reports, such as those on flood risk, are automatically approved due to administrative silence, that is, , provided that the administration expressly issues a negative report.
PSPV Criticisms
For the PSPV deputy in Las Corts, María José Salvador, the legal text does not represent great innovations in practice and leaves many gaps, and she also regrets that the term “climate change” does not appear in the entire document.
According to Salvador, it is a first decree, which “only systematizes already existing regulations and does not go into the depths of what reconstruction must be, which is nothing other than urban and territorial resilience.” Furthermore, he states: “It’s like running to go back to the photo from October 29. They do not consider how to protect the territory and the people affected by DANA to provide greater security in the homes and in the industrial estates where they work. It is a patch, there is no supramunicipal structural approach. In the end it is returning to a non-resilient reality. We live at ground zero of climate change, and therefore measures must be taken especially in the municipalities affected by DANA, and they are not addressed in this decree.”
For the socialist deputy, it is not clear whether the buildings to be rehabilitated must be subject to the Patricova guidelines, which among other issues establish that the ground floors must be connected inside with the stairs that go up to the upper floors.
Furthermore, it denounces “the contradiction that exists between this decree that is only limited to the municipalities affected by DANA and the simplification decree that unprotects the entire Valencian territory, provides sectoral reports such as flood risk and allows constructions at 200 meters of the coast” and adds: “The worst of all is that it does not address the main thing, which is to consider giving more security to homes and estates. “What’s the point of relocating if perhaps it will end up in soil as flood-prone as the one it was on?”
According to Salvador, “it can also be rebuilt without this law, since the special plans have already been used to build housing, for example in Sociópolis, and to build industrial estates such as the Juan Carlos I in Almussafes.” Regarding the supposed speeding up of deadlines, he assures that “an urban plan, no matter how fast it may be, takes three years.”
The PP highlights that the decree is key to sustainability
The spokesperson for the Environment and Territorial Planning of the Popular Group in Les Corts, Jesús Lecha, has valued the Reconstruction Decree Law, approved by the Consell and published in the Official Gazette of the Generalitat Valenciana, as a “key element for security and sustainability” of housing in the Valencian Community after the floods last October. Lecha has highlighted that this decree offers “tools for efficient reconstruction that respects technical and environmental criteria.”
“The Consell of Carlos Mazón is committed to the reconstruction of the affected municipalities, but also to preventing tragedies like this from being repeated. Something that was not achieved during the Botànic Government, which preferred to apply supposedly protectionist laws instead of tackling necessary works to prevent floods,” stated Lecha.
In the words of Lecha, “it is essential that the Sánchez Executive assumes its responsibility and guarantees these infrastructures. We cannot allow the passivity and delays that characterized the socialist mandates to continue affecting the Valencian Community.”
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