The legal services of Barcelona City Council have long enjoyed great prestige for their high level of knowledge of public administration. They have been a model for their robustness, reliability and judicial respect. This respectability was often a deterrent for third parties when it came to filing appeals against municipal decisions. It is true that the political command also helped because the government initiatives were previously agreed upon with the social and economic actors involved.
This trend was broken in the last two terms that the Barcelona council has presided over. The shower of complaints, challenges and major administrative disputes has been unusual in the Catalan capital. It would be a mistake to confuse the “political” complaints that sought to undermine the mayor, most of which have been filed, with numerous other judicial appeals against decisions that raised serious doubts about legal certainty or violation of regulations.
Justice is slow and, therefore, the resolution of legal conflicts raised in the previous legislature comes now and the new government will face the consequences. However, no one can be taken by surprise because the municipal legal services warn every year of judicialized matters with a high probability of being contrary to the interests of the City Council. In that document they not only warn of the probabilities of judicial defeat, but also quantify the cost to the public treasury of the mess in court. The figures raised are millionaires. So everyone is warned.
The cases of rulings against the City Council have been numerous lately, although the two most recent are very relevant. The first was the ruling on the so-called Green Axis of Consell de Cent Street. This summer the court gave the City Council a monumental slap when it considered that this urban planning operation was poorly done because it ignored the metropolitan impact. Therefore, he ordered the street to be returned to its original state. The works will not be undone for the millions it would entail, but it is a political lesson. The second case became known on Friday when the City Council admitted an error that allowed at least a thousand tourist apartments to be authorized, which was exactly the opposite of what the municipal government intended.
But stay tuned because the list of judicial scares is not over, as the legal services know well. Challenges over the Amazon tax, dark kitchens or Uber taxis await resolution. Any company serious about this problem would open an investigation to prevent it from happening again. But in the administration it does not happen because, no matter how much the legal services warn of the shipwreck, the last word is with the politician who can drive the ship against the rocks because he knows that the cost of the rescue will not come from his pocket but from the innocent citizens. .
