Cancun, QR. During the first press conference offered by the newly appointed general director of the National Fund for the Promotion of Tourism (Fonatur), Javier May Rodríguez, the most recent change in the layout of the Mayan Train in Section 5 north was announced, which implies the suspension of the works at the height of Playa del Carmen where an elevated boulevard was being built for more than two months that would cross the urban sprawl and extend eight kilometers towards Cancun.
The changes announced yesterday will be integrated into a new course, with technical studies that Fonatur has already begun to prepare and that will be presented in the coming days.
This modification would be the seventh in the planning of the line that the federal project has suffered in its different sections, but the first that implies the suspension of a work already with progress.
One of the changes was when President Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced at the end of 2020, after canceling the tender in which BlackRock was the only participant, that Section 5 would no longer be financed through a public-private partnership, but with public resources, divided into two segments: north (Cancún-Playa del Carmen) and south (Playa del Carmen-Tulum).
Section 5 south was awarded by tender to Grupo México, while the north section remained in the hands of the Ministry of National Defense, which announced in March 2021 that it would build its section on a second floor in the center of highway 307, for to be the best solution that the military engineers had found.
The elevated section was scrapped at the end of 2021, which constitutes a second change to this line, before the departure of Rogelio Jiménez Pons as director of Fonatur, who announced that in addition to deciding that the road would run at ground level, They would also move it to the side of the road to run alongside the CFE power lines that run parallel to Highway 307.
That new line, he said, only maintained an elevated section that began eight kilometers before Playa del Carmen and crossed the entire urban area on a viaduct parallel to the overpasses that cross the city, whose work was definitively suspended yesterday, as announced. by May Rodríguez at the press conference offered in Cancun.
Said cancellation of work is a third change of layout, since the entire North Section 5 will run at ground level, no longer in the center or on a second floor of Highway 307, but on a new route that is unofficially known to be located at seven kilometers inland, through private land and land belonging to the Puerto Morelos ejido.
Another change in the planning of this section left Asur out of the project, a consortium with which since the beginning of the current administration it was said that they were working to design the station that would be located at the Cancun International Airport, but in mid-2019, Jiménez Pons announced that they were already looking for other options for both location and design. Currently the station is planned to be located outside the air terminal.
In June 2019 it was announced that the project would have a cut of 55 kilometers, which would be reflected in savings of 5,500 million pesos. With the change of route, the fifth, the train would go from Valladolid to Cobá and then to Tulum, to reach Cancun, according to Fonatur. In a few months, this change was discarded to return to the original line that goes directly from Mérida to Cancún, through the rights of way that ICA has, the operator of the highway that runs along this route.
Merida and Campeche
In September of last year, Fonatur announced that the road would no longer pass through the center of the city of Campeche to avoid possible relocation of homes, and protection by the population.
Just a few days later, Fonatur announced that the train would not reach the area known as La Plancha, in the center of Mérida, but instead would move to the Teya area.
Indaabin will set prices
In addition to the change in the layout of the train, the head of Fonatur yesterday, January 19, announced that the lands of three municipalities of Quintana Roo, (Solidaridad, Puerto Morelos and Cancún) included in the Declaration of Public Utility released on last Monday in the Official Gazette of the Federation (DOF) for their possible expropriation, they will be valued by the Institute of Administration and Appraisals of National Assets (Indaabin) and under these terms the payment to their owners will be negotiated.
The official assured that it is false that this procedure is going to be carried out without consulting the citizens, in addition to the fact that after his appointment as head of the project, it begins with a “very practical stage,” with the aim of completing the entire circuit. railway no longer at the end of 2023, but in July 2023, which is when they will begin to receive the first trains built by Alstom.
Although he asserted that there is agreement with the majority of the owners of these lands, a large part of which are hoteliers, the valuation of Indaabin could be a source of disagreement.
Concerted expropriations
Yesterday’s conference was attended by the head of the Secretariat for Agrarian, Territorial and Urban Development (Sedatu), Román Meyer Falcón, who explained that what was published last Monday in the DOF is only the beginning of an administrative procedure that will not necessarily end with the expropriation of the 198 properties that are included in the Declaration of Public Utility.
“This is due to the fact that many of the properties that were notified have encumbrances and the only way to be able to resolve this issue quickly and agilely is through a ‘concerted’ expropriation, so we reiterate that it is the beginning of an administrative process; it is not a process of final definition that all the properties are going to be affected”, explained the official.
estados@eleconomista.mx