MIT on the agenda
A PUBLIC meeting about MIT licences – the procedure designed to legalise homes built on greenbelt land in the countryside – took place in Orihuela yesterday (Thursday).
Expat commissioner for town planning, John Kirby and regional director general for town planning, Vicente García Nebot explained the process of legalisation to those who attended the Maria Moliner public library in the city.
The regional town planning department notes that territorial impact minimisation – which has the acronym MIT in Spanish – is the ‘regularisation of dwellings built on greenbelt land’. The process seeks ‘to minimise the environmental impact generated by dwellings built in an unregulated manner’ on this land. Following decades of problems with these homes built in the countryside, the Valencia government’s land protection agency (AVPT) has worked on 968 cases and signed up 279 of the 542 town halls in the region in its first year.
To mark its anniversary, the agency held a conference in Elche last Thursday about town planning discipline, and ensuring rational, sustainable and legal use of land where construction is prohibited.
This included the efforts being made to enforce planning laws on this sort of land, in order to protect natural resources, landscapes and heritage.
The AVPT defends this land by taking responsibilities from town halls for enforcing town planning discipline against serious and very serious violations.
The total number of homes on land not for building in the Valencia region is 193,919, according to the land registry (catastro), of which 66,671 were constructed before 1976, thereby effectively making them legal under the revised LOTUP land law.
Of the approximately 128,000 built after 1976, 107,851 are susceptible to legalisation with MIT procedures, including 51,379 in Alicante province, 44,898 in Valencia and 11,574 in Castellón.
AVPT director Manuel Olcina said the agency is useful to town halls, which were struggling to keep up with enforcing town planning discipline.