The conversion of two Wied Għomor villas into a hotel was finally laid to rest on Friday when the Planning Commission unanimously refused the application.
The commission ruled that the change of use runs counter to Out of Development Zone policies which only allow projects that give a wider environmental benefit to the area.
Moreover, it said the conversion would lead to intensification of activity in the area, especially through the generation of traffic and the exacerbation of existent parking problems.
“The original application for this site in 2016 was to convert two dilapidated structures into dwellings. Had it been presented as a hotel or a touristic accommodation, it would not have been accepted in the first place,” one of the commission members, Anthony Borg, noted.
The conversion had originally been recommended for approval.
The two residential villas, both with swimming pools, were approved by successive permits in 2017 and 2018.
The applicant, Karl Camilleri, had managed to get a permit to build two villas with pools and then started operating it as a guesthouse. The Valley guesthouse had been accepting bookings without a permit to operate it as such. It even had a website and a booking system and featured on popular booking websites such as Booking.com.
He then applied for a change of use permit but on the basis of this illegal use, the PA board had indicated it would refuse the permit. However, rather than getting a refusal, the applicant withdrew it in September 2019 and resurrected it last April, when he once again applied for the two villas to be transformed into an 11-room guesthouse plus a two-bedroom guest apartment.
The applicant’s architect, Anthony Fenech Vella, stressed that the change of use was not going to increase in any way the volume of the building on site and neither was it adding any structures. He also insisted that the tourism accommodation was not going to cause any noise pollution because it would go against the kind of product his clients wanted to offer.
But St Julian’s mayor Albert Buttigieg and Swieqi local council representative Anton Valentino insisted that the change of use from residential into commercial was precluded at law and that the only planning policies governing such changes did not allow commercial operations in ODZ areas.
Buttigieg reiterated that the project would continue the commercialisation of the locality and quoted an objection by the Environment and Resources Authority which spoke about the cumulative environmental impact of the application.
Commission chairman Martin Camilleri said the proposed use would intensify and acerbate traffic generation and parking problems within a site situated in a scheduled and protected valley.
“For this reason, the proposal is not considered to comply with the rural policy. The proposal also runs counter to [other policies] which aim to improve the traffic management and road safety,” he noted, adding that there was also a shortfall of parking linked to the proposal.