A group of people who live next to the former Halland Hotel are appealing a permit for a 10-storey residential complex on the Ibraġ site, insisting the application review process made a complete mockery of planning policies.
The development, which will replace the hotel fronting Wied Għomor, was granted permission at the end of 2018. The project is being proposed by Tumas Group’s Halland Developments Company and its architect is Ray Demicoli.
But architect Joanna Spiteri Staines, representing residents who are appealing the decision, believes the case officer’s report about the development application was “flawed and biased”.
The report, she says in the appeal, failed in its primary purpose to inform the planning board about the scrutiny of the proposal against the relevant local plans and policies.
“The planning board therefore took decisions based on a number of crucial flawed or omitted facts,” she said.
One of the issues which the residents are flagging is that the hotel was built over 30 per cent of the site. This is in line with local plans, which allow development in the area a maximum 40 per cent site coverage.
According to Spiteri Staines, the approved plan would see 93 per cent of the site built at ground level, where there is a pathway leading to the ODZ valley.
The development planning application report justified this by taking the average of all 10 floors, which will be built in a pyramidal shape, and saying that the average footprint satisfied the maximum site coverage, she explained.
In her 27 years of work experience, Spiteri Staines said she never saw such “gross misinterpretation of this basic policy of maximum site coverage”.
Moreover, the lowest level is receded by circa two metres from the ridge edge, the ODZ area and the protected Wied Għomor while the previous hotel was set back between nine and 15 metres.
The new residential development is set to retain the height of the hotel, which Spiteri Staines pointed out had been allowed because of its importance in the tourism industry.
“This in an area which is ambiguously referred to on the local plans as ‘to retain the existing height’, which is clearly controversial since the existing height of the Halland was well above that of the Ibraġ apartments, specifically because of its economic importance,” she said.
“In redeveloping as residential units, it is completely unacceptable that the previous exemption on height is utilised. A new building should have had to conform to either the semi-detached parameters of the entire area or, at most, the five floors of the neighbouring Ibraġ apartments.”
Additionally, the new development will go up to a height of 10 floors based on the previous Halland height of seven floors – with the last floor having been illegal and the maximum height taken off the top of the lift shaft, the residents claim.
The appeal, which is also contesting the misinterpretation of the north harbour local plan and other policies and flagging the lack of sensitivity towards the protected valley, privacy and overdevelopment issues, will be heard on March 11.