For the dispossessed of La Tessonnière, a shattered dream on the Côte d'Azur

In 1991, when they acquired their plot, everything was clear: the area was buildable, integrated into a Zone d’Aménagement (ZAC) desired by the municipality. Thirty years later, the dream has run aground in the meanders of the Plan Local d’Urbanisme (PLU). On July 12, 2024, the Conseil municipal of Rayol-Canadel endorsed a decision that felt like a guillotine. By deliberation No. 67/2024, the entire sector shifted to a 'NL' zone. Two letters that mean 'Espace Remarquable' within the meaning of the loi Littoral, but which, for these families, mean above all: unbuildable, unsellable, lost. What was meant to be an inhabited district is returning to nature, leaving the owners with property deeds worth little more than the paper on which they are printed. Voted in the heart of summer, the revision of the PLU of Rayol-Canadel thus crystallizes tensions, and the owners denounce a procedural opacity and untraceable documents. The stage was set on July 12, 2024. As Var sank into summer torpor and eyes were turned to the beaches, the Conseil municipal voted on a crucial deliberation: revision No. 1 of its Plan Local d’Urbanisme (PLU). A decision fraught with consequences for the future of the municipality, and more particularly for the 55 owners of the Tessonnière sector.

DIGITAL BREAKDOWN?

However, what should have been an act of democratic transparency turned into an obstacle course for citizens. First, the date raises questions. Choosing the middle of July to record such a modification ensures that the legal posting at the town hall will meet a sparse public. But it is in the following days that the administrative machine seems to have seized up, or perhaps been too well-oiled, depending on the point of view. When the applicants' counsel tried to obtain the official text of this deliberation in late July, they received a strange document. The deliberation was there, but it was an empty shell: the annex, containing the substance of the new PLU, had disappeared. On the municipality's website, there was radio silence. The preparatory documents were still online, but the final version, the one that is legally binding and from which the appeal periods begin to run, remained invisible until August. For the applicants, the pill was hard to swallow. How can one contest a rule of the game whose lines cannot be read? This suspicious timeline outlines a desire for obstruction, a 'strategy of attrition' aimed at discouraging any challenge by playing for time and sowing confusion. On the merits, the affair looks like a battle of experts where the reality on the ground seems to distort. The Municipalité justifies classifying Tessonnière as an unbuildable zone (NL) by invoking an 'espace remarquable' within the meaning of the loi Littoral. To support this thesis, it relies on a bailiff's report dating from 2018, describing a dense forest of century-old holm oaks and a thriving biodiversity. However, the counter-investigations carried out in 2024 and 2025 paint a radically different picture, accusing the initial document of misrepresenting reality. Where the administration sees an ecological sanctuary, the experts commissioned by the owners discover a garrigue overgrown with mimosas, illegal dumping, and a notable absence of protected species. More troubling, some photos in the 2018 report appear to have been taken outside the sector in question. The argument of a 'pristine natural zone' clashes above all with the physical reality of the site. For Tessonnière is not a wild forest, but the ghost of an aborted urban project. The ground still bears the scars of costly developments carried out in the 90s: paved roads, underground sewage networks, electrical transformers, and fire hydrants are indeed there, operational, waiting for houses that never come. This is the entire paradox of this case. The municipality, which is losing its inhabitants at a rate of 1.8% per year and is sorely lacking in housing, is freezing its only serviced land reserve. It is transforming a ready-to-build neighborhood into a 'wasteland coupled with a dump', in the very words of the municipal defense, creating a major fire risk at the gates of existing homes. By wanting to protect a nature that, according to experts, has nothing remarkable left about it on these anthropized plots, the administration seems to have locked itself into a legal and logical dead end. There remains this persistent impression left by the summer of 2024: that of a decision made in the shadows, where access to information has become a luxury that citizens must fight hard to obtain. The bitterness is all the more acute as the decision seems to defy local demographic logic. This is the very core of the brief submitted to the Tribunal Administratif de Toulon by Maître François Barry Delongchamps, defender of the 'dispossessed'. The figures are stubborn: from 871 inhabitants in 1982, the population of Rayol-Canadel dropped to 644 in 2022. A hemorrhage of 26% in forty years. The village is emptying, slowly fading away, but freezing its last land reserves in the name of environmental protection that the applicants deem abusive.