Views: 13

GOB is an organisation that receives many citizen reports related to environmental issues. The association’s 48 years of continuous work help explain why many people prefer to speak with GOB rather than with the public administration.

When these reports refer to environmental alterations or damage, the facts are verified and detailed information is sent to the competent administration. The level of activity varies depending on what is happening in the territory. When there are major operations in forest areas, many reports are received on that matter. When there is no surveillance of fishing, reports come in about illegal fishing, and so on.

One of the regular procedures involves communications to the Consortium for Urban Discipline in Rural Land, an organisation to which letters have been sent since its creation in 2005. Therefore, information has been sent there for twenty years.

Currently, Menorca’s rural land is under the spotlight of many economic interests. The island’s rural landscape is one of its treasures, largely preserved thanks to the first Island Territorial Plan of 2003, which prohibited new land divisions and residential construction on rural land.

However, the current regional government is approving a series of deregulatory measures that directly affect these lands, so highly valued in Menorca. The amnesty for illegal constructions, the elimination of the Island Environmental Commission, or the draft Agrarian Law, are decisions that increase real estate pressure on the countryside.

All this controversy, together with the attempts to modify the Island Territorial Plan, has not gone unnoticed and has heightened public sensitivity regarding interventions in the territory. One thing goes with the other.

When documentation has been sent to the Consortium for two decades, under governments of all political colours, trying to use statistics to suggest that now these reports have a political purpose — as has been implied these days — is not an innocent game. It is a planned intention.

It would be much more interesting to publish information about how many of the cases reported to the Consortium have led to the opening of a file, how many have resulted in a sanction, and how many in a demolition order. It would also be important to know what percentage of those sanctions have actually been collected and how many demolitions have been carried out. That would be real information.