“Having a place to plant your mailbox”: the land, the issue behind the blockage between Sète Agglo and travelers
|Sur l'aire de grand passage de Mèze ce mardi matin Midi Libre – Thomas Ancona-Léger
Access to family rental land (TFL) is at the heart of the demands of travelers who are currently navigating between the different municipalities of the Thau basin. A system which is not currently planned in the territory of Sète Agglopôle.
It's a windy wasteland that's bitten by a wide strip of bitumen. The main passage area of Mèze was reopened this weekend, as an emergency, to accommodate the thirty families and their vehicles who have been wandering from village to village for weeks.
Among them, some formerly evicted from the Frontignan area currently closed for work, but also other people, asked to take the roads of the Thau basin for various reasons and varied. Although they come from different backgrounds, they all have one thing in common: they have lived in the Sète territory for years, and they all ask for one thing: to put their caravans permanently on land.
A non-existent system on the Agglopôle
The TFL, for family rental land, is one of the three devices provided for by the departmental plan for the reception and housing of travelers, with permanent reception areas and high-traffic areas, such as that of Mèze. It consists of a designated plot of land, connected to water and electricity, and equipped with a toilet block for sedentary populations whose ;#39;habitat remains the caravan. In Occitanie, the main TFL is located in Pignan, on the territory of the Montpellier Méditerranée Métropole. On that of the Agglopôle de Sète, there are none.
The opening of the area was initially scheduled for April 1 Midi Libre – Thomas Ancona-Léger
"Our life is here"
This is what the people who landed on the Mèze area this weekend denounce, like Samantha, a forty-year-old who filed every day her two daughters at Gigean school. "We've been asking for family land for over fifteen years, we've been promised it several times, but nothing has happened ;has never been done", she laments.
Beside him, Daisy, 24, makes the same observation. She comes from Ardèche, but has lived around Sète for a long time. "We're not asking for much, just a corner for us to put our mailbox. We have our children at school here, our doctors are here, our life is here."
His companion Michael claims to have tried to acquire a piece of land himself in a local town to store his caravan there during the winter, but he explains that he did not. #39;being met with the mayor's refusal.
A reflection in progress
On the Agglopôle side, Gérard Canovas, mayor of Balaruc-les-Bains also in charge of the management of the reception areas and rental family plots there. Agglo, explains that reflection is underway around TFL. "We are going in this direction, but everything will depend on the next departmental plan, we will have to succeed in convincing state services ", he believes.
Renegotiated during the year, this new plan should suggest, or not, a way out of this continuing deadlock. In the meantime, the small group could stay on the Mèze area until mid-April, and the arrival of the large processions on the site.