The planning authority has fined owners of illegal billboards €400 each for ignoring the June 20 deadline for their removal.
The figure falls far short of what billboard owners charge clients for a month’s advertising.
Fines issued for illegal billboards taken down by Mepa’s direct action amount to €10,800. This covers the removal of 27 billboards from prominent sites in Aldo Moro Road in Marsa, Mikiel Anton Vassalli Street in St Julian’s, Burmarrad Road in St Paul’s Bay and the Coast Road, the planning authority said.
A total of 55 were removed from major arterial roads over the past days
A further 18 billboards were taken down by their owners and did not incur penalties.
A total of 55 were removed from major arterial roads over the past days, Mepa said. More illegal billboards have yet to be removed but the planning authority was not in a position to quantify the number still illegally carrying adverts.
The authority had set a June 20 deadline for the billboards’ removal but it was largely ignored. It then issued a new warning giving owners another three days to remove the structures.
Mepa said it would remove the billboards itself if the warning was ignored, at the expense of owners and advertisers.
The government and the Labour Party had used a number of illegal billboards across the island’s main road network. They were the property of a joint venture, known as Aiken Services Ltd, which built and supplied the structures, together with the necessary artwork, for the party free of charge during the general election campaign.
However, they remained in place after the general election, even though they were supposed to be dismantled within a few weeks.
Despite being illegal, and in some cases dangerous due to their positioning on pavements and crucial road intersections, the billboards were rented out by the private company for commercial purposes at more than €1,000 a month each. Mepa did not clarify whether these were among the billboards removed.
Mepa is increasingly encouraging contravenors to remove the illegalities themselves to avoid punitive fines.
In a statement last week, Mepa also said it had closed an enforcement case initiated in 2010 after a large agricultural site Santa Maria Addolorata Cemetery was illegally used for dumping large quantities of industrial shipping equipment.
Following inspections and warnings of imminent direct action, the owner cleared the site and it reverted to agricultural use under Mepa’s supervision.
The planning authority has a backlog of more than 8,000 pending enforcement cases, some dating back to the early 1990s, on which no action has yet been taken.
Last April, Mepa CEO Johann Buttigieg told Times of Malta the regulator had an additional 4,000 complaints from the public that still had to be investigated. Only after case officers investigate such complaints can enforcement notices be issued.
Mr Buttigieg blamed the delay on lack of resources in the enforcement section.