Environment Planning Review Tribunal to rule on Ħondoq Bay development appeal next Thursday

Gozo Prestige Holidays’ application had been turned down for the development of a hotel and parking facilities, as well as 25 villas, 60 apartments and 200 multi-owner properties in the Ħondoq Bay area

Qala mayor Paul Buttigieg watches the demonstration at Ħondoq ir-Rummien (Photo: Moviment Graffitti)
Qala mayor Paul Buttigieg watches the demonstration at Ħondoq ir-Rummien (Photo: Moviment Graffitti)

The Environment Planning Review Tribunal will be handing a decision on Ħondoq Bay over an appeal filed by developers who want to build a hotel in the area.

Gozo Prestige Holidays’ application had been turned down for the development of a hotel and parking facilities, as well as 25 villas, 60 apartments and 200 multi-owner properties.

The decision on the appeal on the refusal of a PA permit for the development of the valley will be handed on Thursday.

The developers appealed the refusal, arguing their right to a fair hearing had been denied, leaving them with insufficient time to bring forward the experts who had authored studies in support of the application.

Issuing a statement before the decision, Qala Mayor Paul Buttigieg, who has been on the front line against the decision, called on the area to remain as it is.

“We hope that Hondoq Bay will be preserved for those who love it and for future generations,” he said. “Gozo needs to safeguard its natural capital and not become intensely developed and spoilt."

How Hondoq was underhandedly earmarked for tourism

In 2002, the company Gozo Prestige, owned by Gozitan businessmen Victor Bajada, presented an application for the construction of a destination port and 195-room hotel, 200-yacht marina and a tourist village for 300 apartments. The land had been sold to the developers by the Augustinian order.

The Order sold the land on promise of sale to Bajada in 1988 for Lm10,200 (€23,760) – on condition that full development permits were awarded. The promise of sale states that if development permission for the land is granted, the Order will receive the full sale price of Lm10,000 (€23,294) per tumulo and at 68 tumuli, the total sale price amounting to Lm680,000 (€1,583,974).

But the draft for the Gozo local plan, issued for public consultation in 2002, never made any reference to tourist development in Ħondoq. It limited itself to saying that MEPA would consider proposals from public agencies to upgrade beach facilities at Ħondoq ir-Rummien. Any envisaged development was limited to the rehabilitation of the quarry, the provision of basic beach amenities and unrestricted public access to the beach.

A new Gozo local plan, approved in 2006, facilitated the approval of a tourism project, referring to “tourism and marine related uses” and “sensitively designed, high quality and low density buildings that blend into the landscape”. Ħondoq was identified as the site of a “destination port” – a euphemism for a yacht marina.

Indeed the authors of a project development statement for the developers immediately after the publication of the local plan referred to the delay between 2002 and 2006 as “four years of pro-active consultation” with the Malta Environment and Planning Authority.

So while MEPA was consulting with the developer, no public consultation was conducted on the changes made in the local plan.

The developers made bold claims as to their development being an environmentally friendly one. Through landscaping they promised to create the perception that the project was the “work of nature itself” and to create the impression that the new village had “evolved organically over the last century”.

Clearly, back then the wind was in their sail, to the extent that even Gozo Minister Giovanna Debono described the Ħondoq project as beneficial to Gozo.

But the goalposts changed after 2008.

Facing an uphill election, the PN successfully reinvented itself as a more environmentally-friendly party. Upon being re-elected, Lawrence Gonzi even declared a zero-tolerance stance towards ODZ development. For environmentalists, Ħondoq became the litmus test for the seriousness of the government’s intentions.  Moreover, the project contrasted with the PN’s own eco-Gozo vision.

In August 2011, MEPA’s environmental arm – the Environment Protection Directorate – called on the authority to refuse the project. MEPA’s Planning Directorate was just about to issue its final case officer report, when the developers presented new plans dropping the marina, replacing it with a swimming lagoon and retaining the residential aspect of the project.

But MEPA insisted that it could not consider new plans at this stage, insisting that a brand new application was needed.

The Labour opposition was also committed against the project. But no final decision was taken about the project before the change in government in 2013.

In 2016, following a 14-year long saga, the PA unanimously refused the application for the Ħondoq ir-Rummien development – a deluxe 5-star hotel with 110 bedrooms, 20 self-catering villas, 60 apartments serviced by the hotel, 203 apartments, 1,249 underground parking spaces, a village centre – which was to include a church and shops – and a yacht marina for approximately 100 to 150 berths.

The Ħondoq development was deemed by the Planning Directorate to be in breach of the Strategic Plan for the Environment and Development as it constituted “a dense urban development” in a “coastal rural area.”  It was also in breach of the SPED’s vision of Gozo as an “ecological island.” 

But the developers refused to give up and appealed. “The PA has no right to go back on its commitments, arrived at through its own actions, and after having induced the applicant to incur hundreds of thousands of euros in costs and expenses to comply with the PA’s request for studies,” architect Edward Bencini claimed in the appeal presented to the Environment and Planning Review Tribunal.

Surprisingly two years later the Environment and Planning Review Tribunal decided to send the controversial application back to the Planning Authority, after they found a procedural mistake in the handling of the case.

But this ruling was overruled by the law courts following another appeal by the Planning Authority.

The case was reverted back to the EPRT, which still has to take a final decision.