"The mayor of Palma will have to answer for any disasters that may occur after building in flood-prone areas."

Palm"The mayor of Palma will have to answer for any disasters that may follow." building in flood-prone areas"With this warning, Neus Truyol, spokesperson for MÉS per Palma in the Palma City Council, criticized the City Council's strategy on Thursday.eliminate prior authorization from the General Directorate of Water Resources of the Government to expedite the granting of building permits.

The eco-sovereignist party will bring a motion to the next municipal plenary session to try to reverse this measure. According to Truyol, the change means "eliminating the main control mechanism" that guaranteed the evaluation of urban development projects located in flood zones before moving forward.

The councilwoman has been particularly critical of the fact that the procedure is left in the hands of the developers through a self-declaration. "It's impossible for them to have the appropriate data or a comprehensive view of the distribution of water resources throughout the territory," she asserted. Therefore, she insisted that if problems arise in the future as a result of these constructions, the political responsibility will fall on the mayor.

The City Council's decision has been justified by the municipal government as necessary to unblock urban planning files that depend on reports from the Water Resources Department. Municipal sources have even spoken of a backlog of some 500 projects awaiting this procedure, a situation that, according to the City Council, hinders the implementation of new developments in a context of housing shortages.

However, according to official data from the Balearic Government consulted by ARA Baleares, there are 118 pending cases, and the majority – around 80% – correspond to single-family homes. That is to say, chalets planned in flood zones that require a ruling from the water authority before they can receive their license.

Flood zones

For MÁS per Palma, the housing problem cannot be addressed with these types of measures. "The PP is using the housing crisis as an excuse to promote this decision, but the problem isn't solved by building in flood-prone areas," stated Truyol. Recently, the regional government put out to tender a €1.3 million contract to outsource the drafting and processing of reports for the Directorate General of Water Resources, with the aim of expediting procedures, especially those related to housing construction projects. The President of the Government, Marga Prohens, defended a few days ago in Parliament the need to address the administrative "bottlenecks." In this regard, she recalled other reforms adopted at the beginning of the legislature, such as the elimination of the Balearic Environmental Commission, which placed environmental impact assessment reports in the hands of technical staff with the intention of speeding up their resolution. Sources from MÁS, however, interpret these changes as a reduction in environmental control mechanisms. In the motion they will present to the plenary session, the party calls for restoring and strengthening the role of the Directorate General of Water Resources so that urban development projects affecting flood-prone areas once again undergo a prior risk assessment. The proposal also advocates limiting new construction in these areas and prioritizing urban renewal instead of continuing to expand the city. According to Truyol, the debate is not only about urban planning but also about the sustainability of water resources. The councilwoman noted that Mallorca consumes the equivalent of 15,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools of drinking water each year and that tourists use between two and four times more water than residents. In the case of luxury tourism, she added, consumption can be up to six times higher. "If an appeal is made, like the one from the PP, to promote tourism and attract luxury tourism, what is really happening is that the city's water resources are being mortgaged," the councilwoman concluded.