And omnibus bill is a set of large-scale regulations which is usually made up of numerous smaller bills, dealing with one general problem, but encompassing many other issues related to it.
According to the definition given by Madrid, this Omnibus Law 2024 aims, on the one hand, to regulate the provision actions that may occur on consolidated urban landwhile on the other, the transfers of urban use are positivized.
Omnibus Law 2024: who benefits?
It is about the third omnibus law that the government of the Community of Madrid has resorted to since 2021an undemocratic practice that has been implemented in our region to change numerous laws at once, in many cases with significant modifications, thus avoiding the separate processing of each of them, their detailed analysis and the corresponding social debate.
As on previous occasions, this new Omnibus Law points in the exact opposite direction of what its title suggests. It is a law that does not address the balance of the environment and territorial planning, but rather seeks to reduce or eliminate public environmental controls, transparency and citizen participation in space management.
Both urban and rural land, and facilitate the implementation of dispersed projects and infrastructure therein for the benefit of private businesses and real estate capital, promoting urban expansionism and growth, at the cost of a non-substitutable resource such as natural soil, in a territory, that of the Community of Madrid, which has already far exceeded its ecological carrying capacity.
All this to the detriment of the great challenges of our century such as the climate, energy, mineral, raw materials crises, the loss of biodiversitythe unsustainable model of hypermobility, the housing emergency, spatial exclusion and injustice and the unbalanced distribution of resources, among others.
This is manifested in the deregulation of territorial planning – a matter consciously abandoned until now by successive regional governments – through the new watered-down figure of Territorial Plans, with which the elaboration of the Regional Territorial Strategy Plan will be definitively avoided despite its legal obligation to undertake it.
The Territorial Plans will allow the councilor to intervene punctually in the territory, above the General Municipal Plans and the environmental and heritage regulations. to promote projects with high ecological and predatory impact on the territory as macro data processing centersvery high voltage lines, EuroVegas-type developments, the AgroHub Monesterio, residential developments in natural spaces or certain photovoltaic megaparks. Furthermore, these plans will be processed expressly, with practically no capacity for intervention on the part of the citizens, the affected municipalities or the Madrid Regional Assembly.
Likewise, the omnibus law introduces another new figure that fully affects the powers of local administrations over the planning of their territory: the Municipal Strategic Plan that takes precedence over the regulations of the PGOU (General Urban Planning Plans), sowing uncertainty and legal insecurity in the local territorial planning system.
Furthermore, both the Territorial Plans and the Municipal Strategic Plans are new instruments of low technical demand and high opacity, with the sole purpose that the regional administration can promote interventions by private agents on the territory outside of environmental and social controls. In the opinion of the NGO, the regional administration is acting in a completely irresponsible manner and even in the opposite direction to the lessons derived from natural disasters such as Dana in the Valencia area in November 2024.
Furthermore, the modifications introduced in the Land Law of the Community of Madrid (Law 9/2001) expand the uses and activities permitted in rural areas, also eliminating environmental controls and sectoral reports on protected lands.
The omnibus law also confirms and deepens the privatization of administrative management of the building through the so-called private urban collaborating entities, which had already been introduced in previous modifications of the land legislation, and which installs an unequal, inequitable and prone to corruption model in urban management.
The rest of the modifications to the Omnibus Law, prepared in many cases to the dictates of the interests of large corporations – as is evident both in the explanatory memorandum of the law and in the allegations presented by these companies and associations – have a common denominator: putting the short-term economic interest of a few before the development of a sustainable economy that benefits all citizens.
In this sense, the modifications proposed in both the electricity supply law and the water law draw attention. In both cases, the objective is the same: to favor the implementation of large data processing centers (CPD), despite the enormous consumption of energy and water that this entails, as well as the ridiculous impact it has on the creation of jobs.
Nor can we ignore the modification introduced in IMIA, the Madrid Institute of Rural, Agrarian and Food Research and Development, through which the presence of Public Universities is reduced and the three representatives of the unions are made to disappear from its Advisory Council. most representative, while the three of the employers’ associations in the sector remain. In short, one more legal modification that implies setbacks in environmental protection, increases the lack of territorial planning and represents a new loss of citizen rights.