Work suspended on future access road to Ave Park
The Administrative and Fiscal Court (TAF) of Braga has annulled the expropriation of a plot of land where the future access road to Avepark, a science and technology park in Guimarães, financed by the so-called European “Bazooka”, will pass.
According to Jornal de Notícias (JN), the decision has suspended the progress of what is the largest project in Guimarães of the Recovery and Resilience Plan (PRR), with an expected support of 12.6 million euros, but the city council assures that it will finish the work on time.
The route of the new road would start on the EN101, in the village of Ponte, next to a gardening company owned by Pedro Vieira.
According to the same source, the City Hall of Guimarães wanted to build a roundabout on the site and even took possession of Pedro Vieira’s land after expropriating it, but the businessman contested the expropriation and the TAF of Braga gave him reason.
The decision put the project back to “square one” and allowed Pedro Vieira’s company to rebuild in the same place from which it had been evicted.
“One day they came and said that they had to take everything away because they had taken possession of the land,” recalls Pedro Vieira in statements to JN, lamenting that the City Council had not responded to the “several requests” for meetings that he had requested.
The process of expropriation followed, an act that, according to the judges of the TAF of Braga, suffers from “several defects”, including the “defect of incompetence”, since the EN 101 is under the responsibility of Infraestruturas de Portugal (IP) and not the city of Guimarães.
“Since it is a roundabout to be built on a national road, the necessary expropriation for this purpose should be requested from IP,” the ruling states.
The City Council of Guimarães relies on a management agreement it signed with the IP, which authorizes it to
However, the agreement dates from May 2022 and the expropriation from December 2021. In other words, the expropriation precedes the agreement.
According to this national daily, the friendly agreement between the Municipality and Pedro Vieira will be far from being realized, since the Municipality offers 48 thousand euros and the businessman wants 182 thousand.
The Municipality of Guimarães has not appealed the TAF’s decision and says that IP will be the expropriator: “Since the
Since the judgement stipulates that the entity responsible is the IP, it must be the IP to expropriate, after having referred to the IP the respective process of expropriation.
The Municipality assures the JN that “this incident does not in any way jeopardize the respect of the deadlines”, since it is “taking steps to see that both projects [road and roundabout] are carried out”.
According to the project sheet in the RRP, the road must be completed by December 31, 2025.
