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Days before local elections Mazarrón council presents fourth option for Camposol rambla diversion
In February 2018 option 3 was accepted as the most practical scheme and the council was asked to prepare the technical project to progress with this resolution to a long-term problem
Within a few days residents of the Murcia Region will be heading for polling stations in both local municipal and regional elections.
Although the constitution of the winning parties will directly impact on everyone who either lives in or visits, the Murcia Region, in some municipalities the constitution of the local council will have a greater impact, and in the municipality of Mazarrón, which has the highest percentage of foreign residents of the 45 municipalities which form this region, as well as a large residential development which continues to attract media attention due to the unresolved issues left behind by its now bankrupt developer, much is at stake.
Britons are able to vote due to a special Spain-UK agreement which was reached in January, when Brexit was expected to take place two months later, and in Mazarrón account for around a quarter of the electorate. There are 3,254 British entitled to vote in the municipality, accounting for nearly HALF of all Brits registered to vote across the region.
Mazarrón presents an extremely complex political scenario and will be one of the most fiercely contested councils in the region on May 26th. At present the Mayoress is Alicia Jiménez of the PP which won 7 of the 21 seats on the council at the last municipal election in 2015 and used the bitter disagreements between other parties to permit it to take control of the Town Hall and govern as a minority for four years.
However, since then the political scene of Spain has changed radically, and during voting in the recent national elections the PPin Mazarrón lost half of the figure reached at the last general election in 2016 and was overtaken in Mazarrón by both the PSOE and radical right wing party Vox, while retaining only a slight advantage over Ciudadanos. A five-way split was completed by 937 people voting for left-wing party Unidas Podemos, and when local parties are thrown into the mix, as they almost always are in Mazarrón due to the bitter disagreements which provoked the formation of several independent parties and a "pot pourri administration" in the four years prior to the last elections, the outcome of the voting on 26th May is virtually impossible to predict!
So it’s hardly surprising that Camposol has become a subject of Mayorial interest just a few days away from the elections and this week the council held a public meeting to discuss the latest developments regarding the saga of the rambla on the urbanisation.
Although the council maintain that the meeting was well advertised, only 6 people turned up to hear the “latest developments” : three from the Camposol Resident’s association, the CRA (one of whom attended in a non-official capacity), one a representative from FAST, one representative from the D Sector voluntary gardening group and one representative from the Campobus project.
Also present were the Mayoress Alicia Jiménez, Sebastián Delgado, director general of water from the regional government (also currently PP) and two technical staff from the town hall.
Those who are fully versed in the saga of the illegal infilling of a rambla (natural waterway) on the urbanisation may prefer to skip the background info below and head for the latest news in the paragraph below.
Background
Camposol was built by Grupo Masa in four sectors, the final sector, D, on a plot of land across an arterial rambla at the foot of inclining terrain which is the beginning of the slope upwards towards the Sierra Espuña.
In order to maximise their profits, and build a couple of hundred extra houses illegally, Masa filled in a natural rambla, or waterway,(the rambla de Aznares) installing a system of concrete piping to enable water to run underneath the constructions they had built, properties which were constructed without planning permission and in the full knowledge that filling in a rambla was not only illegal, but also irresponsible.
Ramblas are natural formations, cut by nature over thousands of years and act as a natural channel through which surplus water can flow away following heavy downpours. As anyone who has lived in Spain knows all too well, hot summers are followed by autumn storms, which are often torrential. The ground in southern Spain is generally drier and stonier than would be found in the UK, sparse vegetation due to the heat meaning that there is little in the way of organic waste to rot down and give the soil body, which compounds with the fact that when it rains the topsoils are washed away every year, the combination of which is hard soil which bakes to a rock-like consistency in the summer, so the first rains run off, rather than soaking in.
A minor rambla flows into a larger rambla, and in this area, on into the Mediterranean, and the volumes of water which fall can be incomprehensible for foreigners.
This rambla originates further inland and is fed by a network of smaller channels, so the water which runs in a rambla can sometimes originate several kilometres away and cause untold damage in an area which has itself not received a drop of rain.
Few residents on the C and D sectors of Camposol will forget the night of 25th September 2014 when Gota Fría rains hit the Murcia Region and a number of streets on the urbanisation in the Mazarrón municipality were hit by a torrent of muddy water and debris which flattened gardens, demolished walls and carried cars down the streets like paper boats after rain fell inland and drained into the rambla.
The image of a swimming pool lining from D7 racing along a flooded street before becoming wedged between two palm trees on a roundabout several hundred metres away has become legendary and in truth it was little short of miraculous that there were no fatalities or serious injuries that day.
In this particular case, the volume of water totally overwhelmed the system built by Grupo Masa, the pipes too small to cope with the volume of water running off the hills sloping down towards the back of Sector D, meaning the rambla burst out of its natural channel and the water poured down into the residential streets causing a huge amount of damage.
It is easy to see why the problem exists, as the pipes are significantly smaller than the natural width of the rambla which has been cut by the force of the water over the centuries; the pipes are simply too small to absorb a major flow of water such as that which occurred in 2014.
The only solution is to build a wider artificial waterway, capable of potentially absorbing a flow of water on this scale.
Since then, work has been underway to resolve the situation, investigations into how the floods occurred revealing further illegalities committed by the developer, and vigorously prodding the open can of worms which has been the subject of a regional parliamentary investigation to try and ascertain who is responsible for the illegal construction on Camposol, the illegal restructuring of a waterway without the initial knowledge of, or consent of, the CHS, the lack of control exercised by the town hall over the developer, and the sale of illegally built properties to unsuspecting foreign buyers.
The CHS has claimed ignorance of the actions of the developer and criticised the town hall for failing to fulfil its own obligations with regards to overseeing this construction in its municipality, issuing a hefty fine for invading the public domain and allowing a rambla to be infilled on their watch. The town hall, in response, has blamed the CHS for failing to act when they were made aware that an irregularity had been committed, and in-between all of that, various Mayors, architects, town hall planning officials and politicians have cast the blame on each other.
The regional assemblyinvestigation blamed all of the above, issuing a damning report detailing the irregularities and the failure by multiple parties to prevent the issues compounding, as a result of which the courts are now investigating if there is a criminal case to answer.
In order to analyse the options open to them, the town hall commissioned a 193-page report by engineering and environmental Company ‘Trazado’ entitled ‘Study of alternative re-direction routes of The Rambla de los Aznares, from its original path through The Camposol Urbanization, (Mazarrón, Murcia)’ which was completed in May 2017 and submitted to both the town hall and the CHS for consideration.
Various routes for diverting the rambla were considered, taking into account the natural flow of the land, technicalities of building a more substantial artificial subterranean water course which could cope with the potential volumes of water occasioned by a Gota Fría, and the practicalities of taking such a course through a residential area, and finally “route three” was agreed in principle by both the town hall and the CHS in February 2018.
The next step was for the town hall of Mazarrón to prepare a technical project, for approval by the CHS before applying for the appropriate permits to undertake the works, which the council must pay for, in order to amend the municipal Plan Parcial and adopt it into the Plan General, a legal requirement.
By August 2018 the town hall had not completed the technical project, and what can only be described as a “political bunfight” broke out as the national government changed from PP to PSOE and the new delegate of the national government in Spain visited the urbanisation as part of a tour to inspect provisions made for flood control ahead of the autumn rains.
At a meeting held to discuss the situation the Mayoress was clearly agitated by the topic of who was going to pay for the works. The press statement put out by the government delegate made it absolutely clear that the Spanish state expects Mazarrón council to pay for the works. The press statement of the CHS says that the organisation has agreed the route and will do everything possible to assist in the tramitation of the required documentation to assist the town hall to carry out the works, but the Mayoress stated that Mazarrón CANNOT afford to pay either the 8 million euro fine for failing to prevent the promotor infilling the rambla or pay the estimated 4 million euros it will cost to divert the rambla, and refused to accept any blame for the irregularities, blaming the bankrupt developer. (There is no money from the assets of the developer as the debts were too high and the courts ruled out any malpractice in the running of the company when permitting it to enter into insolvency).
Since then, there has been silence about the topic apart from a CRA meeting with the CHS to request information in November of 2018. The CRA was told that the CHS was waiting for the council to submit the necessary paperwork and constitute the working party recommended by the regional parliamentary investigation.
What happened at the meeting this week?
This week at the meeting, the council presented a fourth alternative route for the diversion and reconstruction of the rambla, which goes around the outside of Calle Babinas, minimising the amount of work which would be required within the residential areas of the urbanisation, and thus potentially minimising the disruption for residents.
The plan is for the tubing to start higher up in the rambla than in former projects, enabling the engineers to follow an alternative route around the urbanisation rather than through it.
This option, the council claim, will reduce the cost of the project considerably, and they also maintain that the cost of undertaking the works will be funded by the regional government, not the town hall itself.
The plan has yet to be presented to the CHS for its feedback and approval.
The President of the Camposol Resident’s Association, Silvana Buxton, who is standing in the forthcoming municipal elections as a candidate for the opposition PSOE party, expressed her surprise at the contents of the presentation, querying “Why is the Mayoress proposing to submit a new report to the CHS, when all she had to do is to approve the modifications proposed by the CHS on the 1st August 2017?”.
Sra. Buxton also queried why the council had failed to implement the recommendations of the Regional Assembly investigation into irregularities surrounding the construction of the urbanisation, that a round table and working group be set up to address the problems on Camposol and find solutions to the problems.
She maintained that the Mayoress is “just playing for time and acting well beyond the decisions of the CHS and the recommendations of the Regional Assembly.”
On May 26th the region goes to the polls, and the political scenario of the region could well change substantially, affecting ANY of the projected solutions for the rambla.
At a regional level, opinion polls indicate that there could possibly be a change of regional government from the PP, the PSOE having achieved a substantial swing in their favour.
Of course there is the possibility that the PP may keep control of the regional government, but opinion polls appear to indicate this could be unlikely, and regional media have been busy discussing the possibility of a coalition with Ciudadanos being the only mechanism by which the PP may retain power.
And in Mazarrón itself, the meteoric rise of far-right wing party VOX with its fierce anti-immigration policies has astonished many observers, Mazarrón being one of very few municipalities to field a candidate, and should the national election voting pattern be repeated in Mazarrón, the council could well include an important VOX presence, potentially powerful enough to control council policy or even run the council, an ironic situation; a far right anti-immigration party controlling the municipality with the largest percentage of foreign voters in the region.
So logically, the possibility that the current administration may not be in a position to implement Plan 4 after the 26th May must be taken into consideration.
And whether the residents of Camposol with the right to vote actually do so, will undoubtedly influence the outcome of the elections in Mazarrón and the attitude towards resolving the issues which remain outstanding.
Join the South West Murcia group on Facebook to keep up to date with all the latest news and events in Mazarrón, Alhama de Murcia, Fuente Álamo, Águilas, Totana, Lorca and Puerto Lumbreras;https://www.facebook.com/groups/SouthWestMurciaEventsAndInfo/
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