NEW  VALENCIAN

PLANNING  LAW

By Juan Bertomeu Vallés, Lawyer

The LRAU marked a significant turnabout in the way of managing the land in the Valencian town planning, and it is necessary to recognize in favor of his application a considerable increase of the magnitude of land that has been urbanized in suitable conditions and put on the market for the construction of housings.

 The decade of application of the LRAU has made clear some legal loopholes and interpretations not wanted by his authors.

 On the other hand, it has been the “prodigious decade” of the Spanish Town planning, in which almost every year a Law or a Sentence (of the Supreme or of the Constitutional Court) was provoking a revolution in the fundamental principles. The LRAU has survived these earthquakes, but it seems that there has come the final hour.

 The LRAU has taken as a great virtue a system of town and country planning, on having introduced as basic criterion the distinction between Structural Planning and Detailed Planning, decisive factor that determines the sphere of powers or competency of the Town hall and that of the Generalitat. This criterion is the basic limit that the Town hall have before to decide the review of the General Plan for the Town and Country planning.

 With support in the principle of Municipal Autonomy in the Town and Country Planning, and under the legal presumption that the decisions of the Town hall interpret correctly and properly the General Interest, sometimes up to absurd limits, the Town Halls prepare General Plans that on paper are nice, but that in their execution do not always bear in mind the wellbeing of the owners.

 It is a sovereign decision of the Town Hall any determination on the Detailed Planning: classification of land – urban land, building land, not building land-, Sectors, Areas of Execution, tracing of future roads, etc. Also they decide on the basic characteristics for the development of each one of the sectors, across the “cards of planning and management”. And many other decisions that nobody understands but that to all it affects.

 This way, when they delimit the sectors of urbanizable land, often they usually include in them housings, without bearing in mind if they were constructed under a granted license, not if they really need that their property becomes urbanized.

 In fact, the making of the General Plans is the cause of all the problems derived from the application of the LRAU. If the sectors were delimited or defined with common sense, excluding from his sphere the already built-up properties, probably the LRAU would not be named today by the British press with the contemptuous and undeserved name of Land Grab Law.

 The Programs of Integrated Action and the Developer

 The LRAU introduced a series of innovations in the execution of the planning with the target that more land became urbanized, with better quality and more rapidly, so that the territorial planning was not staying in simple exhibition of intentions, but it was materializing in realities after his execution. 

 These innovations were precisely the Programs for the Development of Integrated Actions and the figure of the Urbanizador, today so denigrated and so slightly understood. His target was not other that to provide with major agility to the phase of management of the planning, allowing the rapid execution of the infrastructures and putting on the market  the resultant lots of the land development.

 The LRAU, this way conceived, was a positive instrument for the achievement of a public aim established by the Spanish Constitution: the right of all the citizens to a worthy housing.

 Nevertheless, the law had many loophools; never had clear regulations that should specify points that were remaining subject to the free interpretation of politicians, municipal technicians and candidates for developer in general. For lack of Jurisprudence as consecuence of the innovation that supposed the LRAU, forced interpretations a few times and strict in others, have ended in a series of seemingly unfair cases.

 The Courts have already put safeguard to these abuses, fulfiling the legal loopholes, all beginning to fall into place, by giving an opinion almost always based on the common sense (and … surprise! In the same LRAU and State legislation), which is what sometimes seems to be absent to whom dedicate themselves to formulate General Plans of Urban and Country Planning.

A New Scheme

 The LUV, Town-planning Valencian Law, has  two essential targets: to reinforce the rights of the owners of land, and especially the rights of the owners of land consolidated by the building and/or by the urban development, and to grant major transparence and competitiveness to the processes of selection of the Programs of Integrated Action and of the proper Developer.

 A new fundamental commitment of the developer for the sake of the owners is that the price for which he turns out to be an awardee of the management of execution of the Program must be the maximum price that will be able to knock-on effect to the affected owners. On the other hand, if in the public competition awards the work to a sub developer who executes it cheaper than the price for which the developer himself awarded it from the Town Hall, the benefit or obtained discount does not have to be for this one, but for the owners that there are, after all, those who pay the urbanization.

 The complementary commitments of the Developer  

 The “card of planning and management”  fixes how shall be developed a sector or a unit of execution. But the Developer can to commit himself to more and promise better qualities, infrastructures, children’s playgrounds, and even an municipal elders' residence, for example. Essentially it works this way: The developer commits himself to do something to what he is not forced by the card of planning and management,  to achieve that the Town Hall approves and awards to him  the execution  of the PAI.

 With the old LRAU, for years it was understood that the improvements (understood as gifts for the municipality) proposed by the Developer with the target to be better considered by technicians and municipal politicians (and these to be able to defend the awarding before his people and the press) were charges of the urbanization, ending in a kafkaesque situation: the developer gives, the town hall accepts and even wait for more, but who pay is not  who offered, but the owner affected by the urban development.

 The recent jurisprudence has made very clear that this "improvements" offered by the developer cannot be understood as counter services that the developer offers at the cost of the owners, since this way the public competition would not have sense if the candidates do not support the cost of their own offers.

 The  Valencian Planning Law has made this absolutely clear.