The extraordinary plenary session with which the City Council of the capital has concluded the political course this Monday has allowed the PP to carry out the modification of the General Plan for Urban Planning of Madrid (PGOUM), which dates from 1997 and which, among others, It will regulate the activity of the grouped kitchens, will make the use of public land more flexible, will recognize new ways of living such as cohousing or coliving and will prohibit the construction of homes of less than 40 square meters, among other issues.
The session has been a preview of what can be seen throughout the recently launched legislature in which the PP will enjoy the parliamentary roll derived from the absolute majority obtained at the polls. And, despite the vote against the two lefts -Más Madrid and PSOE- and the abstention of Vox, the mayor, José Luis Martínez-Almeida, has managed to unblock a parliamentary process that had been pending at the beginning of the year by not achieving, then the necessary supports.
After its approval in the municipal plenary session, the new text must go through the Community of Madrid, which must give its approval within a maximum period of four months, although the municipal government hopes that the regional Executive does not run out of time.
The text to update the plan is the same that the coalition government of PP and Ciudadanos tried to approve without success throughout the last legislature due to the lack of agreement with the municipal group of Vox, which although it supported the advancement of the regulations , ended up rejecting them for allusions to “gender ideology” and the 2030 Agenda.
As he already did in the extraordinary commission prior to the elevation of the text to the Plenary, the delegate for Urban Planning, the Environment and Mobility, Borja Carabante, welcomed the approval of the regulations and assured that thanks to the absolute majority obtained by the PP on May 28 has allowed “to circumvent the permanent boycott and blockade of the left and Vox.”
“These are necessary, essential and urgent regulations”, he assured in his speech at the municipal plenary session, in which he highlighted the importance of adapting the general plan to the economic and social reality of the city of Madrid, whose challenges “have nothing to do” with those of 1997.
One of the issues addressed by the new text is the controversial industrial or ghost kitchens, whose licensing is paralyzed by the moratorium imposed by the municipal Executive of PP and Citizens and which ends on August 16.
The new regulation limits its implementation in residential areas for qualified or alternative use to premises for industrial use with a maximum of 350 square meters and a maximum number of eight kitchens.
In addition, all the premises will have a waiting area for motorcycles and delivery bicycles, as well as a room for delivery people, with a minimum area of ??five square meters per kitchen, and will have a room for the reception of waste with dimensions appropriate to the conditions established by ordinances on the matter. In the same way, a mobility study will be required to find out the impact that these facilities will have on the environment.
For the deputy spokesman for Más Madrid, Eduardo Rubiño, debutant in the Cibeles plenary session, the approval of the update of the plan with the only favorable vote of the PP sets “a bad precedent” due to the lack of consensus and has predicted that the concession of licenses for grouped kitchens after the approval of the Community of Madrid will plunge the capital into “the law of the jungle”.
“It is a modification that does not solve the serious problem of ghost kitchens. (…) Once the moratorium is over, there will be a window period that will be a law of the jungle. The granting of licenses will multiply without any kind of control,” said the spokesman.
For the PSOE-M councilor Pedro Barrero, the granting of planning licenses for industrial kitchens leaves residents in a “legal limbo”, while “they will not be able to prevent the proliferation of these harmful businesses in residential spaces”, while , like Vox, has demanded that mobility reports be maintained at the beginning of urban projects.
From Vox, the councilor Ignacio Ansaldo has considered that there is no “improvement” in terms of the damage caused to the residents, while “they group them into eight” facilities per space “and that’s it”.
