Neighbors and entities of Olesa de Montserrat they oppose the Municipal Urban Planning Plan (POUM), a large project promoted by the Barcelona town council that establishes the construction of 1,313 new homes. The last step taken by the members of the platform Olesa Neighborhood Movement It has been to reach a consensus on a joint motion in which they demand the suspension of the POUM and the holding of a popular consultation so that the inhabitants of Olesa have a voice and vote in urban intervention. The last municipal plenary session rejected the holding of the referendum with the votes against Olesà block and Junts per Catalunya -the two parties of the municipal government-, those of PSC and Ciudadanos and the abstention of Esquerra Republicana.
The motion pushed by the residents claimed that the Town Hall’s urban plan be temporarily paralyzed. In addition, it demanded the opening of a new participatory process on the plan that will establish the urban planning of Olesa de Montserrat for the next few decades. Only the CUP voted in favor. The rest of the formations rejected it, with the exception of Esquerra, who abstained. The defeat, however, has not demotivated Moviment Veïnal, the platform that in a few months has managed to obtain the support of 20 entities and 600 neighbors to open a debate on the suitability of an urban plan that is ugly that has only been told with the participation of 97 people, less than 0.5% of the municipality’s population.
The town, with 23,900 inhabitants, had 10,318 homes in 2011, of which 936 were empty and only a minimum number of them were officially protected, according to data from the platform that reproaches the City Council for not having a true participatory process after the POUM. “Therefore, the urban plan is not representative of the popular will”, say the members of Moviment Veïnal, who wanted to leave the final decision, in the last plenary session, in the hands of politicians.
Petition to Rajoy
For now, there will be no referendum in Olesa, a mountain municipality that has already asked the Government of Mariano Rajoy to hold a citizen referendum on urban issues in 2014. So, it was the City Council, and not the neighbors, the who claimed it. The Consistory wanted to ask citizens if they accepted that the Generalitat be asked to annul the Strategic Residential Area approved in the previous mandate; if they wanted to keep the football field grounds for the exclusive use of equipment, and if they wanted an area delimited by a stream and some plains to continue being classified as agricultural. Finally, that consultation did not take place.
The Moviment Veïnal motion demanded that its protests be considered new mechanisms for participation and collective decision “beyond representative democracy.” The mayor of Olesa, Miquel Riera, he points out that the motion was able to reach the plenary session thanks to “the political will” of Bloc OlesÃ, Ciudadanos and the CUP, who decided to include it in the order of the day. After reviewing the 556 signatures submitted, only 444 could be validated, 56 less than the 500 required by municipal organic regulations to be able to present a motion by popular initiative. In this way, it was presented through the neighborhood entities represented on the platform.
“Let the people decide if the municipality grows or not,” says a spokesman for neighborhood activists. The mayor maintains that the suspension of the urban plan would mean “going back three years” and wasting the time of the people who have worked on the project. “It would be a waste of the money invested,” Riera emphasizes. From Junts per Catalunya, they criticize the activists questioning a participatory process “in which the majority” of political groups have participated. And they assure that paralyzing the project would mean “being out of the game in the territorial evolution” of the Baix Llobregat.
The municipal group of Citizens, despite not having participated in the development of the plan, considers that the current one “is better than the previous one.” The PSC was shown in the same vein: “The POUM has had a good process, with participation and a lot of money invested”.
From Esquerra, they ensure that they abstained because they share with the neighborhood movement the idea of introducing changes in participatory processes “but not the lack of legitimacy in the work done” by the local administration: “The representativeness of the elected councilors is unquestionable. the right to decide but, if we paralyze this plan, the previous project would return and everything would get worse, “they say. The CUP, the only party that voted in favor of stopping the project, defends that it is necessary to hold a consultation on two specific points. “Doing it with the whole plan would be very complex”, expose the anti-capitalists.
The municipal urban intervention includes the construction of high-rise houses standing in an area known as Ronda Norte. The intention of the residents is to draw up a new urban plan that gives a better response to the needs of the municipality and improves coexistence with the natural areas that surround it.
The citizen collective demands that, before constructing new residential buildings, the empty flats available to Olesa de Montserrat be used. Neighborhood demands point to the lack of green areas and parks, as well as the low development of facilities and services.
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