The Malta Environment and Planning Authority is about to embark on its biggest reform since it was set up in 1992. Mark Micallef finds out if Mepa chairman Austin Walker is geared up for it.

When Austin Walker took over the hot seat as chairman of the Malta Environment and Planning Authority two years ago, he was not well known.

Over the years he had held posts on public boards and had chaired the Malta Resources Authority, but his positions were nothing like as high profile as his new job at the planning authority.

He spent 35 years in the private sector, working for big companies like the Panta Lesco Group and the Mizzi Group and his demeanour bears it out. Unlike peers with more political flair, he is a straight-talker and tackles planning issues with a common sense approach that breaks away from the bureaucratic form that had become synonymous with the authority.

But he also carries with him a certain naivety about the press that is characteristic among the Maltese business community. A case in point was when he recently compared himself to an expensive car after being asked if he was worth his €93,000 salary.

The question came at the end of a lengthy interview. In his response, intended as a joke, Mr Walker simply said: "If you want an expensive car, you have to pay for it."

The headlines just wrote themselves... 'Austin Martin?', 'Mepa chairman says he is an expensive car'. And so did the online forums with a raft of comments, which ranged from accusations of insensitivity in the face of the current economic climate to critical appraisals of his modesty.

"With hindsight, today I think I should not have been hasty in answering that question with a joke... but it was a spontaneous response. I think I should have elaborated on what I meant," he says.

What he meant, he adds, underscoring that the comment was not intended as a form of self-appraisal, was that the €93,000 plus benefits is the sort of pay package the CEO of a large company expects to receive on the market.

"These sorts of wages may sound extraordinary when compared with some salaries in the public sector, but in this day and age I can guarantee that you will find no CEO of a large entity out there who does not have this kind of salary. And this without comparing the greater demands placed on whoever leads a public institution such as Mepa with the spotlight rightly cast upon it," he says.

The glare of the spotlight was particularly bright when Mr Walker took over. He walked into the authority in June 2008 shortly after a general election in which Lawrence Gonzi attempted to tackle the damage which Mepa was inflicting on his government. The Prime Minister took the authority under his wing and promised reform.

Mr Walker's appointment as chairman was the first step in that reform and now, two years later, the authority is on the verge of implementing it.

A large part of the restructuring, which should be rolled out by October, hinges on speeding up decisions on permits.

Mepa currently gives an estimated deadline, which, more often than not, is delayed by requests for paperwork and feedback from other authorities during the information gathering process.

"The information," Mr Walker admits, "is not collected in an organised manner and this wastes time. Sometimes an applicant could be asked for bits of information on four separate occasions rather than told once what he needs to have everything in order."

But all that will change, he says, and will be replaced by a simple two-step process: a screening process of four weeks and a decision period which will be bound by specific deadlines.

Simple applications, he pledges, will be decided in 12 weeks and complicated ones in 26 weeks. The authority will be able to guarantee that because the information gathering would have taken place in the previous four-week screening period, during which Mepa will inform the applicant what paperwork is needed for an application to be accepted.

After that, the application will be validated and lodged in the authority's system, at which point Mepa will pledge to deliver a decision within the set timeframe.

The system will not apply to complex major projects, which require environmental or traffic studies. However, even in this case, under the new system, these studies need to take place before the application is validated, which means the process after that should be relatively straightforward.

"I don't want to be an optimist and say that after validation we would still meet the 26-week target, but it should not go beyond 52 weeks," he says.

Considering that certain applications have been pending before the authority for many years, this must sound like music to the ears of many. But will it work?

"Well, if it doesn't, this part of the reform would have failed... we need to put our head on a chopping block, starting with me, and see that these parameters are met. Is it fair that a business should wait for four years for a decision? I say not."

But that addresses mostly the concerns of developers, big and small, about the length of time it takes to get a permit from Mepa. What about the environmentalists' concerns regarding the authority's poor decisions and inconsistency?

"When it comes to the charge of inconsistency, I hope we are not consistent in making mistakes... I can imagine that with certain decisions we have been taking lately, there will be people who would say that a year ago we took a different decision. But if we felt that decision was not good, should we take another bad decision... or should we say that from today this is how we will approach this sort of development?"

Many would applaud the common sense of that statement but the situation is not always as simple. The main board of the planning authority, for instance, has taken a number of decisions against applications in which the owners of illegal buildings apply to sanction their building and change its use to make it acceptable.

However, one of the lower Mepa boards recently allowed a small bungalow, built illegally instead of a 'reservoir' outside development zone, to be turned into stables. The owner applied for the change of use after he had been caught out with the glaring illegality.

The end decision "rewarded the illegality" in the words of the Mepa auditor who has insisted, in countless reports, that boards should first demand that any illegal buildings be demolished, before they even consider approving a permit for a new building, stables in this case.

Again, Mr Walker is quite candid on the case: "There is no other way of putting it, it's a bad decision... The problem is that when you have people deciding, each and every person on a given board is going to inject his or her personality and character, their way of interpreting things, into a decision."

But this decision went against a clear message from the politicians and the authority's leadership. Can the reform be successful if board members do not follow his lead?

"Well, this particular application will not even be considered let alone approved after the new law is in place. So I cannot imagine a stronger message," he says.

But he also points out that under the new law, the chairmen of the authority's three lower boards will be appointed vice chairmen. On the one hand, this will place a new level of responsibility on their shoulders, and on the other it will see them attending policy meetings and the hearings of the main board, which decides major projects.

This, Mr Walker, points out, should improve consistency. However, he also draws on the fact that board members will no longer be employed on a part-time basis, giving them more time to work on cases.

The reform reduces the size of the lower board from seven to five but they will all be working full time.

"The new system will also see the board members receive reports on cases they are scheduled to decide on 25 days before the hearing. When you take all this into account, it's a marked improvement over the current scenario in which they have to fight against time to process applications."

But the subject which Mr Walker seems most eager to speak about is enforcement, peppering his arguments about anything planning-related with this subject.

"We are turning the enforcement system on its head. Mepa enforcement will never be effective without a strong deterrent and now Cabinet has approved this principle. Whoever is going to do something illegal will think twice and even three times," he says.

"Unless you do this, it doesn't matter if you have the whole police force and the army at the disposal of Mepa because you will not be able to be effective."

The authority, he admits, got bogged down in the backlog. There are as many as 7,000 cases, lined up for direct action, with some of the cases having been on the list for years.

So far, a bureaucratic procedure has been followed which sees the officers filing fresh enforcement orders with the direct action department, which in turn is busy (often stuck) trying to sort out complicated old cases.

Instead, Mr Walker says, the authority has been prioritising the new cases rather than remaining stuck with the old ones.

"My priority now is to make sure the backlog does not grow because if we start a new system and the new cases are going into the black hole that the list of pending cases has become, then we would have lost the match before even starting."

The authority, he says, put in place a system through which every new enforcement notice against an illegal development must be dealt with by the offender voluntarily or by Mepa through direct action within a maximum of two months.

"In fact, direct actions which we have been carrying out since June have been addressed as new cases."

It sounds promising, except that in this way the old cases never get dealt with. But Mr Walker has an answer for this too.

"We are studying how to tackle the backlog. When you look at the cases, you find that a large section of the cases cannot really be dealt with through direct action."

He cites the example of a block of eight apartments built some 10 years ago which contain a yard that is not in line with sanitary laws. "Over the years it was sold to eight different families. What do we do? Knock the block down?"

For these cases, the authority is working on a scheme which will regularise their position following a screening process, inten-ded to prevent people taking advantage.

But this will be accompanied by a new drive against illegal development, he pledges, which will now have the backing of tougher fines.

The daily fine for an illegal development will go up to a maximum of €50 a day, along with a maximum overall penalty for sanctioning of €50,000 as opposed to the current €2,300. Moreover, illegal development outside development zones and on scheduled buildings will be barred outright.

More importantly, Mepa will be given an executive title by the legal notice which means that it will not need to waste time with legal cases to extract fines from offenders.

He repeats: "There needs to be an element of deterrent because if you don't, it doesn't matter if you have the whole police corps and the army at the disposal of Mepa because you will not be able to be effective."

The measures should come into force in the coming weeks after an information campaign.

Finally, Mepa has been promised a magistrate, who will hear environmental and planning cases exclusively, a measure the authority has been lobbying for and with good reason, he says.

In recent years, in fact, the authority practically stopped taking people to court because of the backlog.

"We have cases from the time of the Planning Area Planning Board, (the precursor to the Planning Authority and now Mepa), which was dissolved in 1992. And this wastes a lot of resources with our enforcement officers having to go to court to give evidence and then hearings getting differed and things drag on..."

A dedicated magistrate would change things drastically for the most important cases, or rather for the offenders who cannot be dealt with in any other way.

"In a case where, for instance, a scheduled building has been pulled down illegally... a fine will not change anything, it will not bring back that building, but justice must be done and that is the role of the courts."

The Mepa chairman is at pains not to raise expectations, stressing that he does not want to sound overly optimistic (perhaps informed by the private sector cynicism towards governmental authorities) but, he still appears confident.

"When you look at all this, the message is clear: Watch it because you're going to pay for it".

Watch excerpts of the interview on www.timesofmalta.com.