Law establishing roads agency will render local councils powerless, says PN shadow minister

The Nationalist Party’s spokesperson for transport and infrastructure Toni Bezzina told parliament on Tuesday that the proposed law to establish a new agency to carry out the government’s pledge to invest €700 million on Malta’s roads would render local councils powerless and unable to decide what was best for their locality.

Speaking during the second reading of the Agency for Infrastructure Malta Bill, Bezzina accused the government of failing to carry out a proper consultation, insisting that local councils had not been informed how the agency would be operating.

He said that while he agreed with having an agency to compliment the work of local councils, he did not believe local councils should lose their power to decide on what work needed to be done.

Bezzina insisted that the minister needed to immediately inform local councils of the agency’s plans to start carrying out roadworks and how they would be coordinated, as not doing so could ultimately result in more problems being created.

The law, he said, would negatively impact local councils as they are today and would strip them of all power.

“With this law the government will be turning the clock back to the 80s,” he said, arguing that it removed the principle of subsidiarity and would make local councils a “simple front desk” for the central government.

He hit out at the government for making it seem as tough it was “reinventing the wheel” or as tough past Nationalist administration had not invested in the country’s infrastructure.

Furthermore, he said the law contained too many ambiguities, which he said needed to be amended to ensure that that taxpayer money was spent well.

On the separation of the roles of operator and the regulator, Bezzina said that despite the Transport minister’s Ian Borg assertion that the new agency would relieve Transport Malta of its role of operator, the bill’s wording showed that this was not the case.

“The agency will be both a regulator and a contractor,” he said, adding that this situation could also lead to potential conflicts of interest.

He asked whether the agency would be obliged to obtain the necessary permits as local councils currently do. The PN MP said he hoped the agency would limit the number of works commissioned through direct orders.  “We are talking about €700 million coming from our taxes.”

Bezzina went on to say that the law would not allow local councils a say in which roads were prioritised, instead leaving the final decision in the government’s hands. He said this could bring about a situation where the government refused to carry out work on a road but would then let local councils deal with the consequences.

At this point, Borg raised a point of order and said Bezzina was misinterpreting the contents of the law. Bezzina however insisted that he was simply reading what was written in the Bill and that he hoped he was wrong.  He asked whether it was the case that non-arterial roads would be still fall within the remit of local councils, given that it appeared that the law was only obliging the government to carryout work on roads it was already responsible for.

Finally, he said that the government should consider having representatives from both parties on its board, while calling on the minister to clarify what the role of Transport Malta would be going forward.

Gozo will get its share of €700 million budget

Speaking after Bezzina, Gozo minister Justyne Caruana stressed that Gozo would be getting its share of the €700 million the government has pledged to invest.

“Gozo should benefit significantly from the €700 million roads project,” the minister said, adding that she had discussed plans for Gozo with infrastructure minister Ian Borg for Gozo to have its own allocated budget. 

“The allocated funds must be a lot more than what is being allocated at present,” she continued, emphasising that the funds should be allocated over and above the ministry’s current €1.8 million line-budget.    

Gozo minister Justyne Caruana

Caruana said her ministry would soon be publishing a first draft of a regional development plan for Gozo leading up to 2030, with consultations on the policy having started in the summer.

She said that a detailed study on an alternative road leading to Mgarr as well on the possibility of having a ring road or bypass in Rabat were priorities to ease traffic in the area.

The minister stressed that Gozo been deprived of the necessary funds to carry out maintenance on its aging roads for too long. She stressed that a change the mentality that Gozo should accept lower standards.

“We must change the mentality where as far as Gozo is concerned, everything passes, that we content with crumbs and for what has been left on the shelf gathering dust remains there and is eventually forgotten,” emphasised Caruana.

Despite criticism from the Opposition, she said that in just under a year since she was made minister, she given the Gozo’s roads the “attention they had never received”, pointing to the fact that the ministry had already spent more than €4 million on a record-amount of work this year.

This, she said, contrasted with the investment made in Gozo by past Nationalist administrations, who she accused of failing to make Gozo a priority and of not administering the ministry’s funds responsibly.

She said work was currently underway on improvements to no less than 18 residential roads, rubble walls and farm roads, as well as masterplans for Xlendi and Marsalforn, which were both in the pipeline.