February 12, 2024 will be remembered as the date of the death certificate of the Special Plan for the Port of La Savina de Formentera. On that day, the Strategic Environmental Report that stopped the entire processing of a key file to update the planning and management of the port service area. The main responsible for the negligence remains silent: Javier Serrathe current president of Compromís, who was then vice-president of the Consell and was in charge of the Conselleria de Territorio e Infraestructura at the time of the expiration. For reasons that for now remain a mystery, Serra ignored all the alerts leading to the expiration of the Special Plan, which now must wait a few years for final approval.
Ignored alerts
The Port Authority of the Balearic Islands (APB), in a letter signed by the president José Javier Sanz Fernández, had alerted the Consell about the situation of the “strategic environmental report”. In a letter in possession of La Voz de Ibiza, it was warned that, “given the proximity of the expiration date of the validity of the strategic environmental report, and taking into account the difficulties in the processing of the file, from this promoting body is requested to the Consell de Formentera, substantive body in this file, which, if it deems appropriate, transfer to the environmental body (….) request for a 12-month extension of the deadline for the final approval of the Special Plan, in case it is not possible to carry out the final approval before the indicated date”. In addition to noting that the deadline was February 12, warned about the “complexity of this file and the interest of both the Port Authority and the Consell de Formentera, in developing a Special Plan as complete and consensual as possible, have required a lot of work and the joint review of the same, and the need for various meetings and exchanges of documentation between the two bodies, all of which makes it difficult to fit the completion of the file within the deadline“. According to Consell sources, Llorenç Córdoba on February 7, the date on which he was notified of the warning note, asked for confirmation of receipt by Javi Serra, which he ratified that same day. By that time, the internal conflict between the Sa Unió coalition and the insular president had already broken out .
Out of time
In a desperate attempt to avoid the inevitable, Serra presented the extension request late, to which it was not entitled, as La Voz de Ibiza had advanced. The request for extension presented by the Consell did not even enter the corresponding time, since the request was presented on February 19, i.e. outside the deadline and with the environmental processing already expired by law. For all this, a resolution of loss of validity has not been issued, since this occurs automatically after the four-year period has elapsed. The urban development regulation had been initially approved in June 2022, during the government of GxF and PSOE.
