Viña del Mar, Tuesday, May 24, 2021. After determining the evident legal affectations of the so-called 6 Oriente Project on the rights of its 16 hectares of land, Las Salinas filed in the Court of Appeals of Valparaíso an appeal for protection against the Housing and Urban Development Service of the Region of Valparaíso (SERVIU), the agency that is carrying out this road intervention in Viña del Mar. The legal recourse specifically requests an injunction to require SERVIU to review a project that “is clearly detrimental to the city of Viña del Mar and to the appellants”. The petition is based on “the illegal and arbitrary action” incurred by SERVIU, after it refused to attend to the request to modify the Construction and Extension 6 Oriente de Viña del Mar project, which “has caused a deprivation, disturbance or threat to the legitimate exercise of certain and determined rights by our represented parties, constitutionally protected and safeguarded by this protective action.” Last February, Las Salinas submitted to SERVIU the technical background supporting the need to modify the 6 Oriente project, since, among other things, it prevents proper pedestrian accessibility and territorial integration of the different neighbors in the sector, including the Las Salinas area. However, and after more than 2 months since it was filed, the authority issued an official response in which it simply stated that “the bidding process does not consider the execution of a design different from the one projected”. The appeal filed by Las Salinas states that the current design proposed by SERVIU “brings serious community damages, by deepening the segregation between neighborhoods, leaving them disconnected from each other”. The text adds that the neighboring communities “will be permanently and definitively deprived of the possibility of having a safe and level crosswalk at the intersection of Calle 21 Norte with Avenida Alessandri, completely preventing the integration of significant sectors with the city of Viña del Mar in which they are immersed and its coastal border”. In the brief filed before the Court, it is indicated that this road solution “will imply burdensome environmental and urban consequences” and, in addition, “neither remedies the environmental effects it has on the communities that surround them, nor does it meet their aspirations”. The text states that it is requested to accept the appeal for protection “in order to reestablish the rule of law as soon as possible, that is, that the authority in question conduct a real study on the significant damages that the 6 Oriente Project generates on the properties of the appellants, in order to generate the necessary modifications to its current project and thus provide a solution to the accessibility problems, segregation and worsening of the quality of life of the neighbors and the community generated by the current SERVIU project, in such a way that it evaluates the efficient, technically and financially justified solutions that have been presented to it, so that it does not generate greater segregation conditions and detriment to the urban quality of the surrounding communities and the urban proposal of Las Salinas, and thus provide a well-founded response and adopt all the measures it deems necessary for this purpose”. The Viña del Mar 6 Oriente Construction and Extension Project is a project developed by the Municipality of Viña del Mar in 2007, updated in 2012 and approved by SERVIU in 2017, which will affect various communities in multiple ways.
It should be recalled that in September 2020, the decree approving the expropriation program for the acquisition of land for the implementation of the 6 Oriente Project was published in the Official Gazette. Although Las Salinas seeks to defend itself against the infringement of its private rights with this appeal for protection, it is clear that this project affects other communities for various other reasons, and that they could eventually join this appeal, summoning SERVIU with respect to what is clearly a bad project.
