No one waited with bated breath for the conclusion of last Monday’s marathon Mepa meeting about the tanker/floating gas storage. Everyone knew what the conclusion would be days before the meeting was held. The formal vote at the conclusion of that meeting was just a procedural move. According to the rules a vote had to be taken, so taken it was. The result was such as the powers that be deemed it fit to be.

But a number of interesting points beg for a comment.

The decision of the chairman not to let the media film or photograph the vote is significant in itself. It reminds me of an anecdote recounted by the renowned Polish film director Kieslowski. He said that when the regime dominated Polish courts were judging Solidarnosc union members it was noticed that no one was ever sent to prison whenever a TV camera was filming the court procedures. The judges knew that a filmic record of their shameful action would continuously haunt them in the future. Faced with a camera they took the right decision and freed the accused.

The Mepa chairman faced with a similar dilemma as that of the aforementioned Polish judges decided to ban the camera. Why was he afraid of a filmic record of the vote assuming that he, and I assume all the other members, did not feel that there was nothing to be ashamed of?

The Mepa chairman took another controversial decision at the beginning of the meeting. After Ryan Callus asked him to read the judicial protest made against it by Ray Bugeja. The chairman refused though later he relented, informing the Board members that Mepa answered the letter that very morning. But should not the members have seen the answer before it was filed in Court? Don’t members insist that they would be treated with more respect, quite naturally unless members are happy to be just a decoration?

The Marsaxlokk Bay Local Plan argues for containment of current industrial use to within the boundaries of the then existing use. The approved use does not go against this proviso. However, given that the environmental concerns at the time of approving the policy (1995) were already high, and given that since that time, EIA expertise and accession to the EU have raised the bar, one would have expected, at the very least, that the area use is redefined through a development brief which takes into account issues of risk assessment, maritime use, Seveso requirements and social impact assessment. This last was requested by the residents of Sliema for relatively ‘simple’ developments such as Fort Cambridge. While not reflecting on the potential impact of such a development, certainly, an FRSU can be considered as a major social impact.

Consistency is a popular term at Mepa. The Board refused St Augustine’s College expansion in an adjacent space, approved the construction of a three floor (plus semi-basement and penthouse) in the Lija buffer zone against the law, approved the construction of a basement in a Grade One listed monument (Manikata Church). Consistency in perversity is still consistency.

Several members of Mepa, in recent years, boasted of how prim and proper they were. Some bragged that nothing untoward would happen under their watch as all procedural minutiae would be strictly observed. A Mepa officer, for example, had described the well-researched proposal to extend underground St John’s Museum as a non-starter. One wonders why such an epithet was not used in this case with so much flimsy and missing information surrounding the project in question.

The former Mepa auditor was right: this was just an expensive charade. Government should have just manned up and used the call in procedure to decide the project. Not even having the decency to give the Board Members the dignity of an illusion of independence shows just how bad things are. However, none of the members seem to have felt tender in their dignity since none objected to this behaviour and their use as a sop to Cerberus.

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