Who is considered a voter of a section? As mayor, do I have an obligation to connect an isolated house to the drinking water network? Can a citizen prohibit access to a rural road? Here are some of the questions that elected officials will undoubtedly ask themselves during their mandate. Because the management of sectional assets, water catchments and even municipal roads are subjects which raise, due to their complexity, a number of questions. “They are recurrent,” observes Bernard Souvignet. And the answers, not always obvious… To enlighten the wearers of the tricolor scarf, the president of the association of mayors of Haute-Loire, in conjunction with the Interdepartmental Chamber of Notaries of Auvergne, therefore brought in “a size”, recently, at the Department. His name: Julien Goze.
Specializing in public and environmental law, the jurist-consultant from the Center for Notarial Research, Information and Documentation (Cridon) in Lyon, led a conference on these everyday issues which require elected officials to have perfect knowledge of their rights and duties. The opportunity for the forty mayors, their department directors and their secretaries, to be served with reminders of the law.
Sectional goods
The problem with sectional property is that what is true for a municipality is not necessarily true for the neighboring hamlet. “There are always special cases,” summarizes Bernard Souvignet, president of AMF 43. In this case, there is only one in Haute-Loire: the commune of Pertuis. It is the only one in the department to have a union commission, responsible for ensuring the management of the section's assets.
Everywhere else, in the absence of a union commission, “competence falls by right to the municipal council,” recalled Julien Goze on Thursday. In other words, the law authorizes him to sell all or part of the property in the section “to carry out his subdivision project” for example. The voters of the section, however, have their say. They must be consulted by the town hall “within six months following the transmission of the deliberation of the municipal council”, added the lawyer. “In the absence of agreement, the prefect rules, by reasoned decree. He can override the opinion of voters to approve the sale – or refuse it. He is your ally,” the speaker reiterated to the elected officials gathered at the Department.
Another secret weapon of the municipal council: it can ask the prefecture that the assets be transferred to it to simplify their management, “if the town hall has been paying the taxes of the section for more than three years”. But it is still necessary to be able to certify that “the non-payment of taxes is due to a malfunction of the section and that the latter's revenues are too low”, clarified Julien Goze, before moving on to the next chapter.
Water catchments
“In law, there is no obligation to connect to the drinking water network, unless a health regulation provides for it,” recalled the Cridon lawyer. In Haute-Loire as elsewhere, residents are therefore free to obtain water from a source or from a borehole. But these must be declared to the town hall. “Why is this important?” “. Because this administrative formality gives “legal existence” to these installations, in a context where the lack of water pushes public authorities (particularly in the South of France) to take new measures to preserve the resource.
For example: and if, tomorrow, an immediate protection perimeter is put in place around the water withdrawal point, what will happen to the owner who has not declared his collection? He “risks having his land expropriated as part of a declaration of public utility, and being deprived of water, without being able to claim compensation. You need to talk to your constituents about it,” recommended Julien Goze, reminding elected officials that their scope of action stops at so-called domestic water. (when this competence has not been transferred to intermunicipalities and management unionsEditor’s note), that dedicated to human consumption. With one exception: “if pollution or any other imminent danger is noted, the mayor then has general police powers”.
