Ponte sullo Stretto, the Infrastructure Decree reforms governance: Commissioner eliminated and Court of Auditors strengthened

The tipping point came after the confrontation between Minister Salvini and President Mattarella.

'I also wanted to discuss the text of the decree with the president,' the deputy prime minister explained yesterday, emphasising that 'there was never any rule limiting the powers of the Court of Auditors'.

The same line on the commissioner chapter: 'We at the ministry take charge of all the procedures to comply with the requests of the Court of Auditors, to go to Brussels to talk to the Commission, and to finally start the construction sites'.

Thus the text that arrived on the table at Palazzo Chigi was rewritten in its most exposed passages, with the aim of paving the way for approval without new institutional friction.

Article 1, which in the drafts circulated on Tuesday contained only the title but left the space blank, now entrusts directly to the Ministry of Porta Pia the fulfilments required after the findings of the accounting judiciary: updating the business plan, acquiring new technical opinions, managing the European environmental procedure, and preparing the new CIPESS resolution.

The formulations that explicitly delimited the perimeter of the Court of Auditors' control or the references to the accounting liability shield no longer appear in the new set-up, while the figure of the commissioner for complementary railway works, identified in Rfi's CEO Aldo Isi, remains.

But in the meantime, for the work the rigmarole of procedures to arrive at a new resolution is long, and the draft decree outlines a real roadmap. It is a matter of securing the "acquisition of the economic-financial plan also for the purpose of incorporating the expenditure variations for the realisation of the work", but also of receiving the green light from Art and the Public Works Council, whose initial exclusion had made the accounting magistrates turn up their noses. Not only that.

The procedures also include new steps through the mesh of the Habitats Directive, with an assessment of the impacts on human health as well, and a new Iropi resolution, the passkey of "imperative reasons of public interest", the only ones that can circumvent European environmental rules.

The tipping point? The new Cipess resolution that will have 'a substitutive nature with respect to all other authorisations, approvals and opinions, however named, preparatory or subsequent to the resolution itself'.

Not only the bridge, however. A note from the Ministry of Economic Development recalls that the decree provides for the extension of the two extraordinary commissioners already in charge of work on the A24-A25 motorway, which connects Rome to L'Aquila.

Among the novelties that should find their way into the text is the transfer to Rfi's managing director of commissioner powers over a hundred railway construction sites, including the Salerno-Reggio.

Then comes, as anticipated today, the rule on bathers with the provision of a standard notice for tenders and the extension to the entire season of the possibility for establishments to use underage lifeguards.