If only the municipality of Bergen had listened to the residents living near the Delversduin in Egmond aan den Hoef, instead of dismissing them as a bunch of nimbys, the historic verdict that the carpet is pulling away under the Dutch nitrogen policy may never have come about. Because the nine Egmonders who triumphed in the Haarlem courtroom on Friday don’t feel like nimbys at all, shortly before ‘Not In My Back Yard’.
“It is completely unfair to portray us like this,” says one of them, Jeroen de Vries (58), who works as a lawyer at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in daily life, in which capacity he acted as an observer for the OSCE at the beginning of April. in the Hungarian elections won by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
‘Of course we benefit from a beautiful view of the dune edge, that’s what we paid the top price for at the time with our homes. But we also care about future generations and about preserving one of the last remnants of nature in the Netherlands. However, the municipality of Bergen refused to discuss this with us. In the eyes of some representatives of the municipality, including councillors, we were nimbys, so we had to shut up.’ The municipality of Bergen, to whom de Volkskrant submitted this article, says it wishes to refrain from commenting.
De Vries and his associates did not think twice about allowing themselves to be ‘slaughtered like a tame sheep’. Together with their lawyer Oscar Minjon, they went to court to put a stop to the new construction project Delversduin, for which the municipality wanted to build 163 houses in the inner dune edge of Egmond, right on the doorstep of De Vries.
Far-reaching consequences
The fact that the court ruled in favor of the residents of Egmond could have ‘far-reaching’ consequences, Minjon expects. By lowering the speed limit on highways to 100 kilometers per hour, the government thought it had saved enough on nitrogen emissions to build tens of thousands of homes. In Delversduin’s case, the judge did not agree. ‘If the Council of State shares the view of the court, the legality of all building permits that the government has granted on this land will be up in the air.’
Was the nitrogen emission for the Egmond residents not simply a stick to beat the municipality of Bergen with, and thus prevent the construction of the residential area polluting the horizon? ‘Of course we seized everything that was possible to stop the construction’, says De Vries. ‘But it was the municipality itself that brought up the nitrogen argument, as a way to condone construction. They said: there is now less speed on the A9, so nitrogen space is released, which we can use for extra living space. That just wasn’t right at all, because a maximum of 100 was always driven on that part of the A9, so there was no reduction in speed at all.’
‘If only the municipality had been prepared for a constructive dialogue, we would have been open to a compromise,’ says De Vries. ‘We were in any case open to new homes on the former asylum seekers’ center site, next to the Delversduin. And building in the Delversduin itself might also have been possible, but we were initially confronted with semi-detached houses with a facade height of 11 meters, so that the view of the dunes would be lost.’
Alternative construction sites
From a touristic point of view, the new-build project harmed Egmond’s high postcard value, says De Vries. ‘Egmonders are partly dependent on tourism. The view of the dunes and the bulb fields is what makes Egmond attractive for tourists. And many residents here enjoy the dunes, they walk with their dog and enjoy the space. I understand that with a view to housing construction, that space may have to be reduced at some point, but completely closing everything in one go is unnecessary. We should not follow the example of Belgium, where the view of the dunes has been almost completely destroyed by housing construction. Then you make Egmond a thirteen-in-a-dozen village, where no day tripper wants to go anymore.’
In addition, there are alternative construction sites in Egmond, believes De Vries. ‘In the old village centres, with a bit of determination and good will, there is enough space to build housing. Think of empty school buildings, former libraries, old fire stations and parking lots. By realizing new houses there, you protect nature.’
De Vries hopes that governments will learn lessons from the sensitive loss of the province of North Holland in court. ‘We have always been dismissed as difficult citizens. If we were allowed to say what we thought of the project, nothing was done about it. ‘Don’t get involved’, we were told by the project leader of the municipality, ‘I’ve been working on this for ten years’.’
‘We have been sent from pillar to post for years’, summarizes De Vries. ‘When we asked for information, we didn’t get it. Then we had to appeal to the Government Information (Public Access) Act, and that took forever. If the congregation had shown some kind of listening ear in all those years, we probably would never have gone to court. But if you keep being told not to get involved, then as a citizen you are still putting your heels in the sand.’