JIMENA We read about this on TioJimeno, and herewith offer an abridged, translated version of the open letter Elizabeth and John Holtermann sent to our colleagues up the road. "To Jimena Town Hall: We have asked for a meeting with the Secretary, and it was cancelled. Meanwhile, we wrote to the Mayor and handed the letter to him personally, but have received no answer. We assume that anyone living in a municipality has the right to a meeting, if not with the Mayor, then with the Secretary. We thought we would no longer have to deal with the same kind of people as we did with the previous administration, but it looks as though we're wrong. Therefore we ask: if the Secretary cancels a meeting and the Mayor doesn't reply to our letter, what's the point in having voted for another party at the elections?" We at JimenaPulse have some answers that might interest the Holtermanns (see below).>>>
A regular reader tells us that there is a law -actually two of them- that obliges any administration to answer a written request within a given period of time.
Article 42.3 of Law 30/92 establishes that, once a request or petition is made (in writing), it must be answered in writing within 10 days. If that period is not met, Article 42.4 of that same law (the following paragraph, in fact) states that a certificate may be requested to say that the 10 days' silence has passed. The administration (national, regional, local, no matter) is obliged to issue that certificate within 15 days, without prejudice of its obligation to resolve the problem, though not necessarily to the plaintive's satisfaction and without using as an excuse a lack of information about it.
We must point out that, over the last few years, the Holtermanns have been having serious problems with the Council about the legality of their house and have used TioJimeno assiduously to protest the matter. They have not been kind, either, with the town architect or the lawyer in charge of advising the Council on town planning, who belongs to the Servicio de Ayudas a los Municipios (SAM).
It is also true, however, that their lovely home was built at a time when the town planning laws were, to say the least, extremely lax - to put it another way, laissez faire was the order of those days. This problem impacts a good many homes all over the country, all too often involving foreigners who bought and/or built in good faith.
2 comments:
Hi Alberto,
We appreciate your efforts, but you MUST get your facts straight before you publish information concerning others.
Our property was built on SUELO URBANO.
Our escritura includes every square metre of our property, and is duly registered at the Registro de Propiedad de San Roque.
The discussion with the Town Hall involves part of our garden, which Pascual tried to claim when he had the idea of making VPO housing next to it.
Of course the housing project never happened, and the Town Hall could not claim land that didn’t belong to them.
There has never been any question as to the legality of our house, period.
We realize that there are people around Jimena who have nothing better to do with their time than re-arrange the truth to add impact to their latest stories while sitting at their local bar.
But your case is different, as you own the only English language blog of Jimena and publish information for the public domain.
As any serious blog publisher does, you must check your sources before you write something like this.
John and Elizabeth Holtermann
As you will see, your comment is now published unedited. My understanding is that there is a question of legality regarding the property, the details of which belong in a court of law, not on my blog.
In any case, the article is about how to get a meeting with the mayor, and the procedures that you may or may not understand but that a caring reader had the kindness to point out. A thank you from you to that reader might be in order.
What many people don't seem to understand is that things have changed drastically all over the country after many years of doing pretty much as anyone liked, provided the right people at all levels were 'taken care of'. I have no idea if this is your case or not, so I can't comment on it specifically, and wouldn't dream of doing so without talking to you first.
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