In a letter I had written on the Times in June 2012, I had expressed my concern at decisions giving up more pristine land for construction, in a country having more than 75,000 vacant dwellings.
I had also lauded Mario de Marco for an article published in April 2012, in which he had expressed a political will to direct the construction industry away from the construction of further blocks of apartments, especially on pristine land, and towards the rehabilitation of old and vacant buildings to rehabilitate and give life to our village cores.
Unfortunately, it seems that the very first decisions taken by the new government in this area seem to be directed in the opposite direction.
First of all, starting from the new MEPA Board. Without going into the merits or de-merits of the appointed members, we do deserve some answers to some fundamental queries which have been raised by the media, especially since we were promised a new age of transparency and accountability. Two news items have particularly raised my concerns: the fact that the appointed representative of environment NGOs was not one of the persons nominated by the same NGOs he is supposed to be representing (coupled with the fact that owning a company which supplies building contractors puts you in a slightly conflicting position to defend the environment from your same clients), and the fact that the new MEPA chairman's salary is to be lowered to a meagre €17,000.
I don't know the new chairman, Perit Vince Cassar, but since his MEPA chairmanship wage is actually lower than the annual €24,000 Franco Debono is getting for his part-time Constitutional Convention post, I am presuming that government is paying him for part-time work. One of the major decisions in the MEPA reform was that Board Members had to accept the post as a full-time employment and refrain from any other income to avoid conflicts of interest. Is the new MEPA chairman still consulting applicants for building permits, or has he refrained from doing any work as an architect?
If you think this is not important, maybe you are one of those who think that it is better for Cabinet Ministers to refrain from being paid the parliamentary honorarium but retain other private income, as has been proved to be the case with the current Cabinet, than for Cabinet Ministers to be paid their honorarium and refrain from any other income to avoid conflicts of interest in their decisions, as was being done in the previous legislatures. If you really believe so, then I hope you are not in the majority, because in that case we can forget ever having a serious liberal democracy of European standards.
Another decision which should have raised eyebrows is the invitation to developers to suggest land reclamation projects anywhere around the island. Here we are not talking about land reclamation for some national infrastructural project, like the Freeport or the Power-Station. Here we are talking about private investment for more construction in an already over-developed island, increasing our economic dependence on unsustainable rape. I wholeheartedly concur with De Marco's call for caution in this regard, while I hope environmentalists voice themselves as they used to do under the previous administration.
The other decision which is of concern is the lowering of MEPA fees. While many might have thought this to be a 'good' measure, I think it is fundamentally unjust, apart from completely forgetting the polluters-pay-principle we were told the new government would be guided by. We are now going to have government subsidizing applications for construction.
Now let's be frank, how many of us apply to build more than their one residential house? So who's going to benefit most from this measure? Looking at the published tables, the application fees for flats, maisonettes and terraced houses are the ones which got less discounted, while huge reductions have been set for demolishing buildings.
Yes, you, I and the unskilled workers who can barely make ends meet, will be subsidizing the applications of profit-making construction magnates and property speculators.
But Parliamentary Secretary Dr Farrugia has told us not to worry, because this reduction in fees will mean more development applications will come in and "increased revenue would cover the shortfall". You know, just like a supermarket discount marketing strategy, reduce prices so that people will buy more.
In the meantime, the European Commission warns of that more monitoring and supervision is necessary to make sure that the property and banking sectors are kept in check. Otherwise a property bubble might be inflated, leading to the economic disasters experienced by other countries.
But here we are hoping that by reducing applications fees they will build more, and propose land reclamation to have more space to build further more.
Something is not quite adding up.
Comments
Post a Comment