Blinded and dazzled

There are plans to build a solar farm just around the back of our house. Not eyesore close but close enough. We knew nothing about it. Well, actually that's not quite true. I probably knew but I didn't know that I knew. I remember seeing a piece on the Pinoso Town Hall website a couple of years back (8 September 2021 to be precise) with the snappy title (translated here) of Public information of authorization on undeveloped land for the photovoltaic power plant called "PSF IM2 Jumilla" in the municipality of Pinoso. The website entry mentioned several plots and plot numbers but it didn't give any real clue as to the location, no map, no village name. Obviously there was no purposeful intention to hide the location.

Now the way that things are made public in Spain is that they are published in a sort of official gazette, the Boletín Oficial del Estado or the Official State Bulletin. I suppose it's just published to the Internet nowadays; no paper version. The Boletín, the BOE, is the national version and there are regional versions. We live in the municipality of Pinoso in the province of Alicante. The three provinces that make up the Valencian Community are Alicante, Valencia and Castellón. Anything of municipal, provincial or regional concern is published in a regional version of the boletín called the Diario Oficial de la Generalitat Valenciana. I remember writing an article for the old TIM magazine about how things were officially published in Spain and, in drawing a comparison with the UK. Researching that article at the time I found things out about both systems that I had not known before.

One of our neighbours found out about the plans, I think because he saw some blokes measuring up. It just so happens that, because of his work, he knows how people should be informed about new projects. He's pretty certain that we weren't told what was going to happen as we should have been, that the plans for landscaping the site are inadequate and that, in general, the whole process has been flawed.

Again, to be honest, despite knowing about the BOE and its equivalents I have no idea what the process is for publishing planning permissions. I suppose if a biggish scheme is controversial most of us rely on some sort of interest group kicking up a fuss. If you've passed close to Salinas recently you'll know that's the case there. When that happens we can chain ourselves to trees and face down the bulldozers. I had a quick look at the process is in the UK for planning permissions. Obviously enough there, in the UK, the applicant must be told of the decision as must everyone else who has made a representation to the planning authority or who is an owner of the land or a tenant of an agricultural holding on the land or an adjoining owner or occupier. The UK version adds a caveat which says that the local planning authority should take a flexible approach and make a judgement about whether additional publication of the decision is needed on a case by case basis, weighing up factors such as the level of public interest in the application and the cost of additional notification. 

If Pinoso Town Hall were to follow the same general principles then none of the houses that will have a nice view of the panels owns or rents adjacent land, none of us made any representation to the Town Hall about the project and I don't think that there is much public unrest about the scheme. 

Nonetheless it all just seems a little underhand somehow.