Bathing establishments, first OK for reorganisation. Mandatory tenders by June 2027

Parliament's first green light for the new rules on beach concessions. The reorganisation is contained in Article 1 of the 'salva-infrazioni' decree whose conversion law was approved by the Chamber of Deputies on Wednesday 30 October. Now the measure passes to the Senate for examination.

State maritime, lake, and river concessions for the exercise of tourist, recreational, and sports activities are extended until 30 September 2027, with the obligation for municipalities to start the tenders by the previous 30 June. But mayors will have the option to anticipate the tenders by presenting an adequate justification. The term of the concessions may also be extended until 31 March 2028 for pending litigation or other objective reasons of difficulty in the execution of the tenders. Compensation for outgoing concessionaires is envisaged, to be paid by the incoming ones. A decree of the Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport will have to establish an adjustment of the fees, which will in any case be increased by 10 per cent if the measure is not adopted.

The new concessions will last from 5 to 20 years. The municipality must notify any non-division into lots and the maximum number of lots that can be awarded to a single bidder must be specified, a clause that should serve to protect micro-businesses. In the scoring for the award, the following will also be assessed: the correspondence of the facilities to local traditions and the offer of services that enhance the specificities of the area; technical and professional experience in comparable activities; having been the holder in the previous five years of a concession as the main source of personal income; the number of workers that the bidder undertakes to hire from the outgoing concessionaire; and the number of concessions already held in the concessionaire's territory, penalising multi-licence holders.

Proposals to revise upwards the calculation of compensation for outgoing concessionaires were rejected or withdrawn in extremis. Among the various requests - transversal to FdI, Lega, and Fi - was that of eliminating the limit of the last five years in the calculation of the indemnity and to include instead the company value of the enterprise (some formulations specify "including goodwill", while others refer to "tangible and intangible fixed assets"). The League (amendment with Montemagni's first signature) and Fi (Bergamini) had also asked to allow the current concessionaires to exercise pre-emption in the case of equal bids. Fratelli d'Italia (Zucconi) aimed to raise from 20 to 50 per cent the percentage of payment of the compensation to which the completion of the new concessionary relationship is subordinate, and to bind the successor to present a surety for the remaining 50 per cent.

The amendment on sports clubs, redrafted by the government on the basis of bipartisan proposals and approved with broad consensus in committee, provides for the exclusion from the scope of the Bolkestein directive of maritime, lake and river state concessions if the use is related to the performance of a wide range of sports activities. Activities carried out by sports federations, associated sports disciplines and sports promotion bodies, including Paralympic ones, and amateur sports associations and societies entered in the National Register of Amateur Sports Activities that exclusively pursue social, recreational and psychophysical wellbeing promotion purposes, and provided that the uses of the state property "can be considered as non-economic activities according to European Union law". Therefore, amateur sports clubs and associations remain outside the perimeter of the competitions.