What until recently seemed impossible or legally unfeasible, today has the explicit support of the Generalitat de Catalunya. The scenario for urbanizations like Santa Maria de l'Avall has just changed completely.
Just yesterday, the digital newspaper El Nacional published news that represents a real turning point for our municipality and for thousands of neighbors throughout Catalonia. Under the headline "Illa proposes to order the urbanizations of Catalonia and put an end to the disorder", the Government announced a radical change of course in how administrations should address urban deficits.
In an informative session with the municipal world, President Salvador Illa and the Minister of Territory, Sílvia Paneque, made the new roadmap clear. And the exact words of the minister leave no room for doubt about the importance of this shift:
The end of "all or nothing" and the validation of our demands
One of the main reasons for rejecting the pharaonic 13-million-euro project proposed in Santa Maria de l'Avall was precisely its "all at once" approach, with unaffordable costs for property owners.
In their intervention, the Government explicitly recognized that this approach blocked any solution. "Either everything was done at once or nothing could be done, or everything was executed with unaffordable costs or nothing could be done," acknowledged Paneque. Faced with this, President Illa now bets on **a gradual and realistic path, opening the door to regularizations and partial receptions** by services (asphalting, lighting, etc.).
But the news brings an even more important announcement, something we have been debating for months in Santa Maria de l'Avall as a viable, economic, and ecological alternative:
This point is pure gold for our case. It completely validates the proposal to study autonomous purification systems (such as bio-purifiers) for those areas where connecting to the general network represents a disproportionate economic cost or where the complex orography of the terrain makes it enormously difficult.
It is worth remembering the serious anomaly of the traditional sewage project proposed for Santa Maria de l'Avall: the official report did not even quantify the affected parties. It had to be an independent technical study that revealed that up to 25% of the plots could require installing a private pumping station due to the impossibility of draining by gravity. A brutal technical and economic barrier that now finds an official alternative.
Financing: the ICF comes into play
The third pillar of this historic announcement resolves another of our great concerns: Who pays for all this and how? Until now, the model seemed to be transferring 100% of the cost to the neighbors without offering clear financial guarantees.
The Generalitat has announced that it will put resources on the table:
This means that there will be credit lines under "favorable conditions" to face these improvements, giving financial oxygen both to the councils that assume the leadership of the works and to the neighbors who must contribute quotas.
No excuses for the Corbera City Council
If in our previous article we positively valued that the City Council recognized the problem as a country challenge, today the news from El Nacional gives us the tools to move from words to deeds.
With the Generalitat endorsing autonomous sanitation systems, allowing low-cost solutions and execution by gradual phases, and offering financing through the ICF, there are no longer technical or legal reasons to insist on a 13-million-euro project that suffocates the neighbors.
It is time for the Corbera City Council to pick up this institutional gauntlet, definitively paralyze any plan that implies unaffordable costs, and sit down to redesign the future of Santa Maria de l'Avall taking advantage of this new, much fairer regulatory and financial framework.