"Changing the Mijas PGOU for a completely new one is a commitment we are taking the first step. We want to count on all the Mijas citizens. Not only for those who have urban planning knowledge or business interests in our town or urban planning interests. We want a general plan that belongs to the Mijas residents', announced the Mijas Mayor, Josele González (PSOE). The public consultation of the new General Urban Development Plan of Mijas will be under the new Law 7/2021 framework of Promotion for the Sustainability of the Territory of Andalusia (LISTA). The Town Hall of Mijas wants to replace the previous one that dates back to 1999, and numerous partial modifications were carried out during the last decades.

The Councillor in charge of the Town Planning Department, Andrés Ruiz (Cs), accompanied the Mayor. Ruiz detailed the four main objectives of this prior public consultation: "The problems that will be solved with the general plan initiative, the need and opportunity for its approval, the regulation's objectives and the possible alternative regulatory and non-regulatory solutions".

The document will be published in the next few days so that citizens can present their suggestions or allegations within a period of one month. "They don't have to be large studies but simple ideas or proposals to know what the citizens seek, want, ...etc. It may seem to be simple proposals, but they have a great potential to guide us what the citizens think", said Ruiz, who clarified that "they can point out, for example, that there is a green area to protect, or that there is a lack of industrial land in a certain area".

Citizen proposals

Of what this new plan means for the municipality, the Town Hall has informed us that it will call on the three Mijas neighbourhood councils. "We will work with them to gather their proposals and their ideas and concerns so that they can be added in this general plan. In the mid-term, we can transform a town in which we are closer to technology, have more parks for the enjoyment of residents and visitors and, above all, so that we can provide the municipality with the necessary public infrastructure and facilities for the coming decades," said the Mayor.

One of the aspects highlighted by the government team is that the law, they point out, reserves the initial and final approval of this plan to the municipal initiative. "It will be the government team itself which will direct the plan, which will direct the urban planning policy to be implemented in the Mijas municipality, and which will be the main director of the criteria in the plan," said the Councillor for Urban Planning.

 

The government team hopes that the new PGOU will be approved within four years definitively. "Today, we are taking a first step that will take us years ahead. Firstly, to collect these proposals for citizen participation, next the drafting team will have to work on collecting all these realities, and then the issues that Town Planning has detected to be included in this plan," said the Mayor.

After this first step, an advance of the plan will be drawn up. It includes economic, environmental and traffic studies to be initially approved in the plenary session and then submitted to the sectoral reports (Environment, Water, Roads, etc.). Once the sectoral reports are approved by the Junta, a final approval will come in a plenary session.

What will the new PGOU mean?

We are leaving behind the 20 th century urban planning for a more modern one with sustainable development criteria. With this premise, both the Mayor of the municipality and the Town Planning Councillor have detailed the roadmap that will guide the Town Council in promoting the new PGOU. "This government team has shown that it wants to make decisions that will change our town and look forward definitively. We are convinced that promoting the new general Mijas plan was not only a necessity but an obligation. Mijas is taking a definitive step towards adapting to this new paradigm of sustainable, green, friendly cities, which make all the necessary changes possible.

For his part, Ruiz assured that "we have to combine this sustainable development with the economic development of the city, social balance and, last but not least, environmental protection, which in recent years has become essential for the citizens' wellbeing".

But the new plan also pursues these objectives and many others to unload bureaucratically all urban planning procedures, support the use of renewable resources and energy efficiency in terms of building and urban development, to provide for studies on the city improvement, regulating urban transformation actions or reinforcing communication, and mobility in a municipality as extensive as ours with 265 hectares of urban land "which require that there really is a mobility study, which involves an interconnection between urbanisations, favouring pedestrian routes and alternatives for bicycles, avoiding motorised journeys, and promoting the use of public transport", said Ruiz.

 New features of the new law

Some of the LISTA new features are a dual system of urban planning that replaces the traditional PGOU (General Plan for Urban Planning and Urban Development). In this way, what we know as the General Urban Development Plan is divided into a general urban development instrument called the General Municipal Development Plan (PGOM) and an urban development instrument, called the Municipal Development Plan (POU). The PGOM will establish the new planning model for the municipality, while the POU will do the same with the detailed planning of the existing urban land.

 

Finally, the second major novelty of the LISTA is that "both the PGOM and the POU can now be approved by the Town Councils, without prejudice, of course, to the sectoral reports on the environment, roads, etc. The advantage of the Town Councils having the municipal competence for their approval means that the procedures can be speeded up to a greater extent," Ruiz concluded.

New boost after 23 years

The current PGOU began in 1990, but was not approved until nine years later definitively. It went through numerous hardships, above all from a legislative point of view. "It was born under the protection of the 1992 Law, which was declared unconstitutional by the Constitutional Court. Then the laws of 1998, 2002, the 2006 Decree of the POT of the Costa del Sol, and this dispersion of regulations that affected our general plan led us to make a new plan in accordance with the new law," said the Urbanism Councillor.

The government team points out that the current general plan is outdated. "The current one plans on studies, needs, motivations and objectives. It is three decades old, and is insufficient and inadequate today", said Ruiz.

"We want to create a new general plan in line with the current needs of the citizens and, at the same time, change the approach of the last century, which was much more development-oriented, with an urban planning concept that is different from the current one. In recent years, many business' initiatives, especially those in the technology field, have created thousands of jobs. However, we still haven't found a place in our town as for the lack of a general plan that adjusts to the latent reality of southern Europe and especially Mijas' , said the Mayor. He added that "we are talking about how several decades have passed, and that obliges those of us with political responsibilities to take courageous decisions.

For all these reasons, they insist on the need to renew them. "We are bound as an administration to improve the town and for future generations to have better Mijas than the one we have at present," said González.

For his part, Ruiz said that "the work on the new draft of the general plan should not be delayed any longer, it is a replacement, it can no longer be revised because it is prohibited by law, and the specific modifications do not provide a comprehensive response to the problem that is being generated in the town as we all know".  
 

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