High Street pavement

I refer to the letter by the executive secretary of the Sliema local council (September 19).

It is indeed unfortunate that Josef Grech has chosen to mislead the public on the issue of traffic management in High Street, Sliema. An obligation exists for public officers to state the facts as they truly are.

Fact 1: A clear distinction needs to be made between a pavement and road marking. The bone of contention here concerns a permanent road marking and not a pavement. May I remind the public that the pavement was set back into the hotel property itself. I enclose for the benefit of all a sketch of the hotel frontage with the pavement marked in yellow as well as the road marking indicated with a bold arrow.

Fact 2: Mr Grech misleadingly mentions PA 4291/00, when he is well aware that The Palace Hotel is in possession of permit PA1546/04, clearly indicating the current approved permit and NOT the old permit of 2000. I would like to remind Mr Grech that I personally handed a copy of this approval to him. Had he wished to verify, all he had to do was access the Mepa website for confirmation.

Fact 3: Mr Grech again seems to indicate that the Mepa permit should be overruled in favour of the Sliema local council. I fail to understand how we should ignore Mepa's permit. We are not in a position to verify if ADT was consulted or not; that is Mepa's prerogative, not ours.

Fact 4: As mayor of Naxxar Local Council, I always stated the facts as they stood and was very conscious about not making statements which could possibly misguide the public.

Fact 5: I reiterate that the traffic management was indeed well planned and only fraught with problems following the arbitrary decision of the Sliema local council to ignore Mepa's permit and allow three parking bays for private cars instead of the purposely allocated space for the tourist coach lay by.

The coaches now have no other place to load/unload, except in the middle of the road, causing traffic jams. Surely this cannot be considered as support by the Sliema Local Council for a Lm9,000,000 investment in their locality!