The attempted construction of a hotel in Sarakiniko puts a red line in the building of Milos, with the government extending, even after the fact, a protection net with the suspension of building permits.

After Mykonosand Santorini where the Ministry of Environment has imposed the ban on issuing new building permits with successive extensions, the measure is extended to parts of Milos, without even excluding other islands of the Cyclades, which due to the strong pressures and the intensity of tourism development the State will try to protect.

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In Mykonos and Santorini, the Ministry of Environment presented the Special Urban Plan last summer, but in the case of Milos the corresponding plan is slow to be drawn up, as the study is under the control of the Court of Auditors and therefore has not yet been signed off. It will then take at least two years (at best) to be completed, with no way to determine the exact timing of the Presidential Decree by the Council of State with which it will be enacted.

The immediate steps

For the intermediate stage, in the coming days there will be interventions from the Ministry of Environment regarding the Open City Spatial and Housing Organisation Plan (SXOOP) which, although studied since 2007, was not delivered on time, resulting in the Ministry of Environment placing it under the status of studies that missed their deadlines, incorporating a new planning for the island that will be done through the Special Urban Plan under preparation.

In this context, and following a government meeting held in the middle of last week to take emergency measures (before the island becomes a new Paros where every inch of land has been built on), it was decided by the Ministry of Environment to impose a suspension of building permits.

The suspension will be given to parts of the island that the local urban plan, which was never completed, had decided to protect from building. As government officials say, other areas will be assessed and where suspension measures are deemed necessary, they will be taken before the ministry is forced to crawl behind the scenes, as happened these days in Sarakiniko.

At the same time, alternatives are also being considered on the issue of the operation of the Building Services (SBS), with the aim of better staffing and more efficient operation, with all scenarios open for their return to the central state.

This is a first set of measures to protect the island, as it will be followed by the inclusion of Sarakiniko in the natural beauty landscapes scheme, which if adopted, would have avoided the fiasco with the five-star hotel unit of Unique Development for which the YDOM Milos decided in the previous days to suspend work.

To date, the area of Sarakiniko and the whole of Milos is completely institutionally unshielded. “It is a landscape of special natural beauty that was never protected and that the investor took advantage of the loopholes to get approvals and start building. All this will be thoroughly checked in order to determine whether the approvals were legally given by the competent authorities, but also the building permit itself, and to determine whether the land is buildable, that is, whether it has access to a public road as explicitly stipulated by the case law of the Council of State, “says in “THEMA” the Deputy Minister of Environment, responsible for spatial planning, Nikos Tagaras. Since there is no person on a public road, the building permit is void, since in a possible appeal to the Council of State it will be annulled, as has happened with other appeals in the past.

Pressures from hoteliers

“Sarakiniko is neither a forest area nor an archaeological site, while it has never been in the coastal zone and does not fall within a Natura 2000 site, is not governed by any other protection regime and, finally, by choosing to build a few beds (under 100) it falls under the legislation on standard environmental commitments and the environmental licensing is shrinking to a simple engineer’s declaration.”

Therefore, as the National Federation of Public Employees’ Engineering Associations (POEMDYDAS) points out, because the site is not governed by any restrictive provision, no further review by a public agency is required. Based on the
RMP, building, alteration of the natural ground level and the opening of new roads would be prohibited in the Sarakiniko area. It was also proposed that the beach at Sarakiniko be placed under a protection regime and classified as a landscape of outstanding natural beauty, like the beach at Kleftiko.

The public engineers stress that Milos is under pressure from hoteliers of all kinds, having to cope with the difficulties caused by the understaffing of the Building Service and the competent Council of Architecture, which is responsible for seven critical islands of the Cyclades (Syros, Kea, Kythnos, Milos, Kimolos, Sifnos and Serifos) and has declared since 8 January that it is unable to deal effectively with the hundreds of pending cases.

And all this, the state engineers say, when in Milos there are four more tourist developments being promoted in areas of special natural interest and, they point out, there is no local urban plan, no spatial plan of uses has ever been institutionalized and no special environmental study of the island’s Natura areas.

“The State through its long-standing negligence and indifference has left this type of tourism development especially in off-plan areas to their fate. It has not taken care to shield critical areas such as Sarakiniko, nor to staff the relevant services, leaving room for large tourist interests to act uncontrollably and destroy the Greek landscape,” the engineers note.

Since last October, the Environment Ministry has completed the consultation on the new tourism spatial plan, which after years of delays was drawn up, but has not been institutionalized! Greece presents another European record: although it is the country with the ever-increasing tourist flow and the explosive tourist growth that in more and more islands tends to exceed the carrying capacity, until now it is without spatial planning. The two special spatial frameworks (2009 and 2013) were successively defeated in the Council of State and it took about five governments to prepare the new spatial map.

The energy sector is paying the deficit of spatial planning accordingly, as the delays in the special framework for renewable energy are being institutionalized at a time when the green energy sector is being swamped by a giant wave of tens of gigawatts. The state is coming to impose ex-post rules on renewable energy while the projects in operation and those waiting in the queue exceed the targets of the 2030 National Energy and Climate Plan (NECP).

The setbacks with off-plan building are the other major plague of government planning, since the lack of rules reinforces the anarchic dispersion of settlements, burdens basic infrastructure (roads, water supply, sewage, waste, etc.) especially in island destinations and increases the risk of natural disasters due to uncontrolled building in inappropriate areas, something we see unfolding with unabated intensity in the case of the Caldera in Santorini.

Transitional regulations (until the urban planning is completed) have been postponed at least twice by the government, under pressure and opposition from scientific bodies and professionals, making it another major pending issue that could prevent strong tourism pressures such as that of Milos.

The emergency regulation

Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis had said since the autumn that restrictions on off-plan building are necessary, citing as an example many islands which, he had pointed out, have not surrendered to anarchic building and need to be protected.

“I prefer on an Aegean island to urge people to buy a holiday home in a settlement rather than build a 4-acre plot and burden off-plan building,” he had said. At the time, he had referred to the legislation in question, which will come into effect for as long as it takes to prepare local urban plans that will determine building conditions based on the specifics and strengths of each area.

However, this regulation continues to be for Jerusalem residents another significant delay that the government keeps postponing, intensifying the anxiety among property owners under the weight of successive decisions of the State Council. The latter has become the arm of urban planning as, in the absence of rules, it produces (with its decisions) case law that the State is subsequently called upon to implement institutionally.

Tourist residences drown out permanent ones

“The issues related to building on the islands (ed: Special Spatial Development Plans for Strategic Investments – ESHASE, the recent example of Milos, etc. nor issues of management of the resource in shortage, which is water“, says in a recent study the Emeritus Professor of Environment of the University of the Aegean CIannis Spilanis, who has studied in detail the carrying capacity of the Cyclades.
The Institute has conducted a thorough study of the island’s hydrographic capacity.

Paros, Mykonos and Kos

The study attempts to document and highlight the sustainability issues of the islands that mainly concern the permanent residents through the reversal of the tourism model based on the expansion of real estate and strategic investments in tourism. The State has put forward urban planning, which constitutes a real reform by implementing with resources from the Recovery Fund studies for the whole country that will be institutionalized through 250 Presidential Decrees by the State Council.

But it is doubtful when this plan will produce results. Research by the University of the Aegean shows that in many island regions the residential expansion due to tourism is proportional to the number of dwellings of the permanent residents!

The analysis of the data of three island regions shows significant differences: in the Ionian Islands Region new buildings are 41.4% of the total, with Zakynthos reaching 52.3%, in the North Aegean Region it is only 30.7%, while in the South Aegean Region it is 48%.

The analysis at the level of municipalities and municipal communities gives a clearer picture between dynamic and non-dynamic settlements: islands such as Paros, Mykonos and Kos exceed 60%, but other tourist areas such as the municipality of Loutraki – Agioi Theodoroi exceed 71%. On the contrary, there are a large number of municipalities with less than 20% of new dwellings in relation to the total.

The intensity of building is also documented by the data on land use and its evolution over the last 20 years. The analysis of the data shows that in the Region of South Aegean the percentage of built-up areas is 3.7% of the total territory, Crete has 2.2% and the North Aegean Region 1.89%, while most regions of the country are below 2.5%. But there are also much more extreme situations, such as Mykonos which has 23.3% of its territory built-up and Santorini 20.3%.

Private luxury residences outside the settlement also constitute an aggravating factor, causing nuisance at all levels: land use change with land sealing, water and energy consumption, waste production, etc. These constructions, together with those that will come in the next few years, based on the purchase and sale of plots of land that have been purchased, are considered to intensify the negative effects that have been presented in previous years and concern the overall expansion of building, which is carried out without a plan and without infrastructure networks.