Ponte sullo Stretto, process cleared for new resolution

On the d-day of the security package, after a month of stalemate, Minister Matteo Salvini's decree on infrastructure arrives in port. First on the menu is the Strait Bridge that the vice-premier and Carroccio leader wants to quickly put back on track to bring it to approval as soon as possible, thus remedying the rejection by the Court of Auditors that came in two stages in November and December. The new decree-law starts from here: from the declared need to 'comply with the deliberations of the Central Section of the control of legitimacy' and to set in motion a procedure for a work that remains at the centre of the political scene.

The text that landed on the table at Palazzo Chigi also includes the new super-commissioners - Andrea Gemme, CEO of Anas, who will take over from the existing commissioners for road construction sites, and Aldo Isi, CEO of Rfi, for railway construction sites - and the standard notice for beach concessions. On the other hand, the regulation on stadiums is problematic: according to government sources, the new commissioner - indicated in recent days in the president of the Public Works Council Massimo Sessa - will have to give up one of his two salaries, a stumbling block that had already surfaced in recent weeks and which would now be resolved. But it is the bridge and the restart of the process that is at the heart of the measure. After a series of drafts circulated over the past few days and ended up under the watchful eye of the Colle, the text has changed shape: the MIT has whittled down the appointment of Stretto di Messina managing director Pietro Ciucci as super-commissioner, the downsizing of the supervisory powers of the Court of Auditors and finally the softening of the issue of fiscal damage.

In their place, Article 1 rewrites from scratch all the steps, in the hands of the Ministry of Infrastructure, which once again holds the governance of the procedures, to go to CIPESS and then to the Court of Auditors with the papers in order. The heart of the rewrite concerns the new CIPESS resolution and the investigative package that will have to accompany it, as well as the 3rd Additional Act with the agreement with Stretto di Messina, which also ended up in the bin in December with another rejection by the accounting judiciary. And so the decree sets down in black and white a phased procedure that reopens the administrative path without going back on the overall structure of the work. It does not start from scratch, from the tender, which had also been the subject of objections in the accounting judiciary's pronouncement, but from the reconstruction of the documentation and the definition of a new authorisation framework capable of withstanding a new preventive legitimacy test.

Underlining the scope of the decree is the ministry led by Salvini in a note released after yesterday's Prime Minister's meeting, which spoke of a process that "continues in accordance with the Court's deliberations" and that aims to strengthen coordination between the central administrations involved - from the Prime Minister's Office to the MEF, to the Environment, Interior, Defence, Civil Protection and Health - to produce "the necessary technical-investigative integrations". The sequence identified by the decree envisages the updating of the concessionaire's economic-financial plan, the acquisition of new technical and environmental opinions, and the construction of a proposal for a resolution capable of overcoming the accounting magistrates' findings.A key passage concerns the relationship between the two acts that have marked the last junction of the bridge: the additional act to the agreement with Stretto di Messina and the Cipess resolution on the project. The Italian Ministry of Economic Development stresses the need to clarify the "logical and chronological relationship", one of the points on which the revision of the text has focused in recent weeks: therefore, first the resolution and then the deed and not vice versa as happened in the past. Also part of this new roadmap are the fulfilments on the Habitat directive and the dialogue with the European Commission, called upon to build the environmental and legal perimeter on which the new decision will be based.

The same article also provides for the appointment of Rfi's managing director Aldo Isi as extraordinary commissioner for the access railway works, with the aim - the ministry explains - of moving the ground infrastructure forward 'quickly and in parallel with the main work', as the MIT emphasises. Alongside the bridge, the decree also intervenes on other infrastructure dossiers that have remained in the background until now. New commissioners have been appointed for part of Anas's road works and for the railway construction sites, with the declared aim of speeding up the works already begun and strengthening coordination between central administrations and territories. Then there is the chapter on motorway concessions, with regulations aiming to rebalance the economic-financial plans after the Covid season. The standard notice for beach concessions also passes scrutiny, while the extension for the use of underage lifeguards until the end of the next summer season is cancelled.