A municipality can, according to the Court of Cassation, use a subtlety when creating a ZAC to rule out, with a high probability, compensation for expropriated persons at the high price of building land.
According to the judgment of the Court, it is sufficient for the municipality to draw its future concerted development zone (ZAC) in several sectors, possibly far from each other, so that the expropriated land can no longer correspond to the building category, of which the value is much higher.
Having mastery of ZAC projects by deciding on the place of creation, the surfaces and the dates of the project, elements which influence the evaluation of the land, the municipalities have the power to act on the amount of compensation for expropriation. .
An owner of expropriated agricultural land contested the compensation offered. It is building land, he pleaded, because these 4 hectares are classified as a building zone by the local urban plan and are served, as required by law, by road networks, electricity, sufficient drinking water and sanitation to serve the whole of this future sector.
This individual won his case before the Court of Appeal. The law, which requires sufficient networks to serve the entire future area, did not provide for a ZAC to be disseminated, she observed. In addition, existing networks will logically only serve the sector in which they are located. To demand that they have sufficient capacity to serve in addition the 16 hectares of the other sectors of the ZAC, dispersed or even remote, amounts, explained the Court of Appeal, to demanding an impossible condition and therefore artificially depriving these plots of the value of the land build. This undermines the principle of fair and prior compensation required by the Constitution in matters of expropriation, she concluded.
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But the Court of Cassation applied the law to the letter and quashed this judgment. The town planning code requires that the networks be able to serve the whole of the area, she noted, and there is no distinguishing whether the area is in one piece or if it is is a multi-site ZAC with several distinct, separate and distant sectors.
The owner of the land in question cannot therefore obtain compensation for the price of the building land since the networks are insufficient for all the dispersed sectors, concluded the Court.
(Cass. Civil 3, 8.1.2023, E 22-10.143).
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