Matosinhos, Portugal, Oct. 17, 2024 (Lusa) - The ANMP said on Thursday that local councils want to shorten the time and reduce the bureaucracy involved in taking administrative possession of abandoned private plots of land and clearing them to prevent forest fires.
"The aim is to shorten the time it takes to enter a piece of land and clean it up," explained the president of the National Association of Portuguese Municipalities (ANMP), Luísa Salgueiro, speaking to journalists in Matosinhos, in the district of Porto.
According to the mayor, municipalities can now take administrative possession of private land, but they face "many obstacles from a formal and bureaucratic point of view".
"For a town hall to enter any land that it knows poses risks, it has to go through a series of steps in a lengthy bureaucratic administrative process, which involves obtaining a declaration of public utility so that it can then enter that land and clean it up," she said.
Luísa Salgueiro, who is also in charge of Matosinhos City Council in the district of Porto, pointed out that when the local authority identifies a piece of land that is full of weeds and poses risks, "it takes months of waiting" until it can clear it.
"And by the time it becomes possible to clean it up, it's often too late. We need a declaration of public utility so that we don't have to wait months to enter the land," she said.
For this reason, the municipalities' aim is to speed up this process, reduce waiting times and bureaucracy, and not take possession of them, a proposal that they are going to send to Luís Montenegro's government, she said.
The ANMP president clarified that the municipalities are not going to take away anyone's property, expropriate anything, or own anything because the property title remains untouched and belongs to them.
She emphasised that what was at stake was the possibility for local authorities to enter the property more quickly, clean it up, and then charge the owner the costs, as is already the case.
According to Luísa Salgueiro, the cost of cleaning up will always be borne by the owners, because the owner of a piece of land knows that to own it, they have to have the necessary cleaning conditions in place, otherwise they put their neighbours at risk.
"If you don't have the means, you must get rid of those properties. What they can't do now is have properties in a poor state of cleanliness that jeopardise the safety and even the lives of other people, as has happened repeatedly in Portugal," she added.
However, Luísa Salgueiro defended the importance of municipalities having the financial means to respond to needs like these.
She added that civil Protection is a function of sovereignty and the state, and when these competencies are transferred to local councils, it is important that they are accompanied by the "necessary and sufficient financial means".
The mayor also considered it important to allocate funds from the Recovery and Resilience Plan (PRR) to rural and forest fire prevention.
In this context, the minister of agriculture, José Manuel Fernandes, said today that he was looking forward "very positively" to the measures that the ANMP will present to the government to prevent and tackle forest fires.
Speaking to journalists in Armamar, where he visited orchards affected by the bad weather, José Manuel Fernandes said the government is "very open" to the ANMP's proposals.
"We want a consensus on this issue, and by the end of this year, we will present a national pact for the forest," for which “the position of the local authorities is crucial, and all the entities involved in the forest will be called upon to intervene,” he emphasised.
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