[ANALYSIS] Is construction more powerful than the pandemic?

Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, it has been business as usual for the construction industry. Only last week I was invited inside a dwelling by an elderly relative living next to an excavation site.

“This is the noise I have to endure every minute of the day from 7 am to 7 pm,” one resident told me, showing me the cracks in the kitchen walls, which the contractor will only repair once the works have been fully completed. Locked inside their homes, elderly persons living next to excavation sites will experience double anxiety; the fear from the virus coupled by the fear of another house collapse.

Prime Minister Robert Abela has gone to great lengths to reassure the building industry, holding regular meetings with the MDA and declaring that the construction industry will be “a vital part of economic recovery” after the pandemic recedes. In short, the country is too dependent on this industry to even pause its activity for a few weeks, while the country is in partial lockdown. Forget a green new deal, the solution seems to be that of dishing more permits to kick start an economic recovery.

No break in permits

The construction industry is so powerful, that only last week to the shock of a number of board members, the Planning Board was summoned for a public hearing to determine a number of applications presented by top guns, including the sanctioning of illegal excavations by Joe Portelli and a new tower by Michael Stivala. It was only thanks to the outrage generated by an article published on MaltaToday and the timely intervention of environment minister Aaron Farrugia, that the meeting was cancelled.   

Yet this was not the end of the story. The show must go on. The government has now issued a legal notice which foresees planning board hearings to continue with the public being given the option of participating in these meetings on-line.

The law clearly states that all meetings of the different planning boards have to be open to the public and that anyone can attend such meetings.  A government official explained to me that the public will be given two options to participate in these meetings; appoint someone to argue on their behalf electronically or still go physically to the Planning Authority where they will have access to a laptop connected to the system.

Yet this falls short of what constitutes a public hearing: a collective space where decision-makers come face-to-face with objectors.

Having followed PA procedures for the past two decades, I have noticed how public participation weighs heavily on the mood of the planning boards determining permits.

One such recent example was the AUM campus application in Bormla, which saw the local community making a strong case against the submitted plans, forcing the board to overturn a recommendation by its own directorate to reject the application.

In short, the greater the number of objectors who attend and speak during a hearing, the likelier it becomes for board members to find courage to turn down controversial developments.

Even when controversial permits are issued in defiance of the public mood, the embarrassment of board members is palpable as was clearly the case when the DB project was approved in 2018.

In my experience as a journalist among those attending these meetings, I have often met elderly residents, farmers and people from all spheres of life, some of which might not have access to the internet or who lack the experience of using electronic tools to make their voice heard. Many of these people will not participate in online meetings. They will be denied the opportunity of making their voice heard. This in itself goes against the spirit, if not the letter of the law.

But one may ask should we bring the country to a standstill because of a virus?  The same argument can be applied to more important sectors like education where schools had to close; and justice, where most court sittings were adjourned. What makes construction more important than education, justice and other commercial activities?

Moreover the electronic system may still have been introduced for hundreds of minor planning applications, particularly in those cases where no objections have been presented by the general public.

But even overhauling the planning system was not enough to satiate the construction industry.

The cherry on the cake was that all development permits set to expire before the end of 2022 have been extended by three years. This effectively means that a permit issued in 2017 will remain valid till 2025.

This will inevitably result in more properties being left in a state of abandon or left unfinished for a longer period of time. In this way permits issued in the construction boom of the past years will not expire. And even if new planning rules are brought in to place by that time, we will still have to contend with permits issued through the present policy loopholes.