The Supreme Court endorses the legality of the urban plan for the logistics area of ​​the port of Valencia

Neighbors of the La Punta orchard see their house, affected by the Logistics Activities Zone (ZAL) of the port of Valencia, demolished in 2003.Jose Jordan

The Supreme Court has declared the Special Plan for the Logistics Activities Zone (ZAL) of the Port of Valencia in accordance with law, definitively approved in December 2018 by the Ministry of Housing, Public Works and Structure of the Territory.

The high court thus upholds the appeal of the Valencian Generalitat and Valencia Plataforma Intermodal y Logística, SA, against the ruling of the Superior Court of Justice of the Valencian Community (TSJCV) of March 2022, which annulled both the agreement and the special plan because The environmental evaluation was carried out using the simplified procedure, agreeing with the neighborhood association of La Punta La Unificadora, which reported it.

The ZAL plan, with an area of ​​more than 70 hectares, foresees the creation of a logistics center adjacent to the port of Valencia, where activities and services that confer added value to goods related to international maritime traffic will be concentrated.

The TSJCV, which annulled the plan, then argued that a transformation of the extension and characteristics as planned required, according to the law, that the strategic environmental evaluation be carried out by the ordinary procedure, and not by the simplified one used by the Administration, being the ordinary one of greater complexity and extension, and which, in addition, allowed alternatives to be proposed from an environmental perspective.

According to the ruling, the land referred to in the 2018 plan had already been transformed from its initial situation of rustic land for agricultural use to urbanized land, as the first Special Plan of the ZAL had been executed in 1999, although said plan was annulled. a decade later by the Supreme Court itself for formal reasons.

The judges affirm that from 1999 to 2009, the date of annulment, this initial Plan enjoyed a presumption of legality, without any precautionary measure being adopted to suspend its effects, which is why the Administration proceeded to execute the urbanization works. planned therein, which ended in November 2005.

This situation, consolidated over time, and produced in the execution of an apparently legal norm, makes it possible to avoid the nullifying effect of the plan by choosing a simplified procedure instead of an ordinary one.

Anticipating environmental protection before making decisions in the land transformation process was no longer possible because this change had occurred and consolidated with the execution of the 1999 plan, points out the Supreme Court.

"It is evident that it is no longer possible for the Administration to exercise its powers to restore the urban order, restoring the state of the land to that provided for in the General Urban Planning Plan of Valencia (rural land for agricultural use), which is what formally "It corresponds to it after the cancellation of the Special Plan, since the Logistics Activities Zone of the Port of Valencia is fully developed urban planning and has an enormous extension."

For the Supreme Court, this represents a decisive fact in the processing and approval of the new Special Plan in 2018, which allows justifying the use of the abbreviated procedure for the strategic environmental evaluation.

Furthermore, it takes into account that in both the 1999 and 2018 Special Plans there was a positive environmental evaluation, although in the latter case it was through a procedure that was not formally correct.

In summary, it points out that “on the confirmed physical reality of these lands, the little environmental impact that the Special Plan entails, given that its determinations come to consolidate the urbanization works that were executed at the time without producing an essential alteration with respect to the existing reality. , so, consequently, its environmental impact is practically non-existent, which would justify the use of the simplified procedure of strategic environmental evaluation."

The creation of the ZAL meant the destruction of dozens of orchard plots in La Punta, which resisted expropriations.

When the fight began in May 1993, more than 300 families had been living in community for generations in the 750,000 square meters of protected orchard.