The Toulouse administrative court has spoken out against the highway project between the Pink City and Castres. The site will have to stop, plunging the work already carried out and the rest of the events in the vagueness.
The Toulouse administrative court decided this Thursday, February 27, 2025 to cancel the environmental authorization of the A69 site. Justice considered that the highway under construction between Toulouse (Haute-Garonne) and Castres (Tarn) did not respond to any “imperative reason for major public interest” justifying to undermine the environment. The prefectural judgment authorizing the site is therefore canceled. The works will have to stop. A decision“Ubuesque: an advanced two -thirds project is arrested overnight,” deploresThe Minister of Transport, Philippe Tabarot, in a press release.
It is the first time in France that a road infrastructure of such importance has been interrupted by a judgment, and not by a political decision. And this decision should have heavy consequences on certain local players. The president of the Tarn Departmental Council Christophe Ramondsaid to himself “Approached by this ubiquitous situation!”. “More than 300 million euros have been invested, 70 % of the art structures are carried out, the end of the work is scheduled for the end of the year, and justice now sounds the stop of the site … What a sense of timing! We walk on the head”, he plays in the columns of the Dispatch du Midi.
Refund, surveillance … An invoice of one billion euros?
Indeed, while the work started in 2023, the site is well advanced, about two -thirds. Bridges, roundabouts have already emerged from the ground as well as exchangers and earthworks have advanced well. Only the coating has not yet been paid. In detail, 200 books are finished and 50 % of the earthworks over the 53 km of highway.
The stopping of the site could therefore cost very expensive, between the reimbursement of the costs incurred, the dismantling, the reforestation, the surveillance of stored equipment as well as the security of the site perhaps through fences: the invoice could reach a billion euros depending on the information of BFMTV/RMC, and between 500 million and a billion euros for Le Figaro.
ATOSCA – The manufacturer and future operator of the A69 – says to take “Act of the impossibility of continuing the work” and the intention of the State to initiate “all the remedies allowing the resumption of the project as soon as possible and in compliance with the regulations”. In the event of a final stop of the site, the State may also have to compensate Atosca or even organize a repair of the section or a new consultation process. Last year, the company recalled that at the peak of its activity, up to 1,200 people worked on the site.
Many jobs at risk
The end of the work would lead “a large majority of these personnel at the mercy of an economic dismissal and therefore unemployed for lack of being able to reassign them on other sites in the region or in France”, confided the company in the columns of Figaro. “Our construction teams, local businesses and subcontractors have been engaged for almost two years to build an expected and supported infrastructure for decades. We have responded to an order from the State after it retained our proposal,”The Director General of Atosca, Martial Gerlinger.
“Stopping the site today would be an ecological and social madness and would cost taxpayers almost a billion euros,” said Tarn Jean Terlier deputy. “This highway is vital for our territory, and its opening up, and I will continue to fight for its realization,” he launched this Thursday, words relayed by La Dépêche du Midi. In fact, the local economy is likely to suffer from this situation.
As the daily Le Figaro recalls, the capital of Atoca is divided between several companies which are all risking to lose their investment in the event of final cancellation of the project. The Pierre Fabre group – Fleury of the Tarnaise and regional economy – deploys for example a building of 10,000 m2 in Castres for 600 employees. The suspension “would lead the group to modify its strategy concerning the establishment and development of its Tarn sites” confides to the newspaper Le Patron du Groupe.
An alternative project defended by environmentalists
As a reminder, centenary plane trees have been slaughtered and agricultural land sacrificed in the case of the A69. For nothing? Some environmental activists already offer an alternative “veloroute” project, a portion dedicated to 87 kilometers between Toulouse and Mazamet surrounded by agricultural spaces and trees that would not destroy everything that has already been built. This project called “another way” had also beenPresented in September 2023 in the National Assemblyin front of a handful of parliamentarians.
The European Ecologist MP Marie Toussaint welcomes the decision of the Toulouse administrative court and thanks “those who fought without giving in to discouragement, under lies, insults and attacks”. According to her, it is “A victory against a project as useless as devastating “.