The Council of Majorca's agency for defence of territory (ADT) is also referred to as the agency for planning discipline. It intervenes where it finds breaches of planning regulations, especially in protected and rural areas.
The ADT is to issue a writ against Escorca town hall for work carried out at Es Guix near Lluc. According to the agency and for the purposes of planning regulations, Es Guix is listed as being in an area of scenic rural interest. This means that there is protected status and that work which provides "urban services" cannot be undertaken.
The town hall has replaced 62 streetlights, has carried out some resurfacing work to a road and has created a pavement. The ADT says that the town hall should not have done this. The mayor of Escorca, Antoni Solivellas, cannot understand why the ADT is taking the action that it is. It was the Council of Majorca which funded and approved the work.
Solivellas explains that the work was financed with a Council grant and that at no time was this withdrawn. In order to ensure that all was correct with the work, he even had a meeting with the Council president, Miquel Ensenyat, who said that if technical personnel approved it, then there would be no problem. There was, the mayor adds, a later meeting with a Council technician. No objections were raised. The Council of Majorca supplied the grant and the town hall awarded the contract for the work.
Once the work was under way, according to Solivellas, the Council informed the town hall there were "questions" about the legality and said that it believed the town hall should stop the work. This wasn't done, and the Council didn't itself "stop anything" or withdraw the grant.
But it would now appear that the Council's local cooperation department, which made the grant, has started procedures to revoke it.
A spokesperson for the Council says that the ADT sent a demand to the town hall for it to "desist" from doing the work. The town hall apparently didn't reply, and so the agency has now decided to take legal action.