Residential destination for agricultural buildings - Legal advice centre

Questioner

Dear, I have a question. We are former farmers and still live at the same location. We stopped working for the company a few years ago. Now we want to change the agricultural designation to residential designation. Former stables have now been demolished. The municipality does not want to cooperate with this for the time being. One reason is that we live in a former LOG area (agricultural development area). We also had a consultancy firm draw up a report on the odour reverse effect, which is positive according to the current policy of the municipality. This report also showed that the adjacent agricultural company is not being obstructed. Mutual relations with the neighbours are good. Now the municipality says that it wants to revise the current odour policy and therefore cannot comply with our request. Do you have any ideas/tips on what we can do to solve this problem? We have the feeling that the municipality is just winging it. I would like to hear from you! Thank you in advance for your efforts. Kind regards.

Lawyer

The odour policy: does the municipality want to revise this to your advantage or disadvantage? The underlying idea is that the area is still in agricultural development and perhaps the odour nuisance standard will be increased?

Questioner

The municipality wants to revise it to our disadvantage. The reason is a recent report 23-03-2015 from the GGD (also 2 years ago). They want to draw up a new odour policy based on this recent report. Can this just happen ???????

Lawyer

Yes, but the deviation can be a reason to compensate you, but only if there is a sense of trust (in which case there must be a promise from an official with authority to you that your plans fit in with the future plans of the municipality, or that you can go ahead as you please, systematically not enforcing and trivializing). In any case, the above will not happen anytime soon.

Lawyer

There is much ado about giving former agricultural rural homes a residential destination. There seemed to be a good arrangement via the Rural Homes Act, but as a result of statements by the Council of State, this law has become much less useful, especially on the point of odour nuisance. From your question I gather that based on the current odour regulation, the agricultural destination could be changed to residential (no obstacle for adjacent business), but that future developments (new odour policy?) would stand in the way of this. You also write that this is a former agricultural development area. It seems to me that both issues are in conflict with each other. It seems that the municipality could possibly cooperate, but does not want to. I do not gather from your question that you have already applied for an environmental permit for the conversion of agricultural use to residential use. As long as you have not applied for such a permit, there are no legal possibilities to effectively get out of your impasse and you can be kept on a string. If you do apply for a permit, the municipality must adopt a position that you can have reviewed by the court if necessary if the municipality refuses to cooperate.