{"id":270,"date":"2022-03-20T09:15:29","date_gmt":"2022-03-20T09:15:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alontal.brandale.co.il\/?p=270"},"modified":"2022-04-24T05:02:40","modified_gmt":"2022-04-24T05:02:40","slug":"coastal-zone-protection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alontal.org.il\/?p=270&lang=en","title":{"rendered":"Coastal Zone Protection"},"content":{"rendered":"
    \n
  1. The Mediterranean coastline in Israel is only 196 kilometers long. After subtracting 50 km. of shoreline designated as industrial or military zones a quarter in practice is not accessible to the public. Simple division suggests that there is roughly 1.5 centimeters of coastline per person. In thirty years — it will 0.8.<\/span><\/li>\n
  2. Accordingly, preserving wide and open coasts constitutes a paramount environmental priority today more than ever.\u00a0 But the country still lose invaluable swaths of coastline to development, as if this was not our most precious common land resource.<\/span><\/li>\n
  3. There is nothing new about this challenge: Israel promulgated a Coastal Environment protection law in 2004 which proscribed any development within 300 meters of the shoreline \u2013 without the special permission of the National Planning Council. Only in special circumstances can it approve plans as close as 100 meters to the water.<\/span><\/li>\n
  4. The law did not speak to the hundreds of development plans which had already been approved by Israel\u2019s planning commissions, whose legality was essentially \u201cgrandfathered\u201d into the statute.\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n
  5. Over the years, some of these old plans have become operational, invariably catalyzing angry public campaigns to prevent their implementation.\u00a0 The results involve massive compensation for the developer, based on the increasingly high price of land in Israel and near the coast in particular.\u00a0 In the case of the Palmachim beach plan, ten years after the plan was essentially planning, there is still a court battle, because the developer was dissatisfied with the 60 million shekels of compensation offered.<\/span><\/li>\n
  6. In short, twenty years after Israel\u2019s Coastal Environmental Law was enacted, it is time to change this situation and require that any old laws which fall within the 300 meters zone be reevaluated by planning commissions.\u00a0 <\/span><\/li>\n
  7. I submitted such a law to the Knesset, but it encountered resistance in the Ministerial Committee for legislation, largely to the high cost that it might engender.<\/li>\n
  8. There is nothing sacrosanct about approved development plans which were never implemented. Their cancellation after twenty years does not constitute an unreasonable infringement on property rights.\u00a0 Indeed, it can be argued that developers who chose not to implement their proposed projects essentially misled government planners when their building programs were approved. If their plans are cancelled after twenty years, at most they should only be entitled to be reimbursed for their out-of-pocket costs.<\/span><\/li>\n
  9. A modification of the law cancelling \u201ccompensation\u201d based on present land values is essential in order for the law to have reasonable economic consequences. Otherwise, the government will be a party to egregious land speculation.<\/span><\/li>\n
  10. Israel\u2019s coasts are a critical resource. Now is the time to do more to protect them as their value will only increase with time.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    The Mediterranean coastline in Israel is only 196 kilometers long. After subtracting 50 km. of shoreline designated as industrial or military zones a quarter in practice is not accessible to the public. Simple division suggests that there is roughly 1.5 centimeters of coastline per person. In thirty years — it will 0.8. Accordingly, preserving wide […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-my-agenda"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alontal.org.il\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alontal.org.il\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alontal.org.il\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alontal.org.il\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alontal.org.il\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=270"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/alontal.org.il\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":915,"href":"https:\/\/alontal.org.il\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270\/revisions\/915"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alontal.org.il\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alontal.org.il\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alontal.org.il\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}