'We want a meeting with the Mayor'

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.