The bill is steep for the Dordogne department, defender for thirty years of the Beynac diversion, this road bypass around the town of the same name, located in the very touristy Dordogne valley. While the deviation was authorized in 2018, it was canceled by the Council of State a year later and definitively buried in 2022 by the Administrative Court of Appeal (CAA) of Bordeaux with an obligation to rehabilitate within a period of twelve months.
But failing to have noted the start of demolition work, in particular of the bridge piers, large concrete warts poured in the Dordogne, the CAA had sentenced the department to 489,000 euros in fines in July 2023. This Tuesday, April 16, the Court again ordered the community to pay 1.433 million euros for having started the restoration late and very partially.
The president of the departmental council attached to the project
The total penalties now amount to nearly 2 million euros, while the work already underway and its demolition are estimated at 40 million. “A colossal waste of public funds for a useless project,” scoffs Philippe d’Eaubonne, president of the ASVD (Association Save the Dordogne Valley) who would have preferred “that the department renovate the roads, which are deplorable. »
Germinal Peiro, the president of Dordogne, cries injustice. “We started the demolition in July and not in October,” argues the elected official who, if he has to “sign service orders soon for the demolition of the bridge piers”, does not intend to abandon his deviation and hopes that the “new” bypass project, submitted in 2023, will be successful. And that it will allow abandoned bridge piers to be reused.
Unlikely according to the administrative court, for which “the new project of the multimodal loop department taking the same route as the initial project cannot be considered as a circumstance likely to explain the delay in the execution of the demolition work and rehabilitation", recalling that the first project had flouted the environmental code, with no possible regularization.
“If we have to demolish everything, it is not 2 but 40 million euros that the Périgourdins will have lost” warns Germinal Peiro.