Mef puts the brakes on 'Salva Milano': less revenue for municipalities

Stalemate on Save Milan. After two days of waiting, the House Environment Committee has still not voted on the long-awaited amendment that should close the tangled affair of the investigations in the Lombard capital. Tuesday and Wednesday were spent waiting for the opinion of the Ministry of the Economy, which, through a series of conditionalities, will ask for changes to the proposal filed by rapporteur Tommaso Foti (Fratelli d'Italia). The comments, however, have not yet been officially filed. Thus, it will be necessary to wait until next week to try to close the game. Reformulating, in all likelihood, the first version of the text. And in all likelihood cancelling those benefits that a rule with an authentic interpretation would have given immediately, which would not only have remedied the past but also allowed for the future with the same modalities, that is, in essence, a Scia instead of an implementation plan.

But nothing to be done. The doubts of the State's General Accounting Office, according to what emerges in parliamentary circles, would be focused on the lower revenues of the municipalities, linked to the amendment. The proposal under discussion envisages, through an authentic interpretation mechanism, that regeneration operations, which led to the start of the Milan Public Prosecutor's investigations, can be carried out with simplified authorisations and Scia and not with more costly titles, such as the building permit, with the approval of the relevant detailed plans.

Beyond the procedural aspects, this has an impact on local government revenues. The authentic interpretation, in fact, does not only have the effect of sanitising the past, by armouring the operations already authorised by the municipality in recent years, but also has the effect of giving guidance for the future. Simplified procedures, therefore, would become the preferred way forward, even for those who have so far done otherwise. Thus, municipalities will collect less. It is precisely the investigations into the alleged building abuse that have highlighted, according to the prosecutors, that in the real estate transactions that ended up under investigation, the urbanisation charges collected by Palazzo Marino would have been significantly lower than the figure envisaged by a more complex procedure (between 40 and 60% less).

Precisely on these points would focus the doubts of the Ministry of the Economy, which in recent days would have taken the path of a positive opinion on the Foti amendment, but conditioned by a series of requests for changes. Modifications that, however, will only materialise next week, when the vote of the House Environment Committee has been postponed. It is not yet clear which way the corrections will go, which could bring the debate back to the starting point of a few months ago, when the opening of a table to outline a new law was hypothesised.

In the meantime, perplexity is growing in the offices of Palazzo Marino over a solution that, after the acceleration of the past few days, seems to be receding once again.