The Church’s Inter-diocesan Commission for the Environment (KA) said today that it was surprised that while Government issued calls for tenders for small parcels of land or buildings, in the case of the Zonqor Point project, it has decided to choose an investor and grant 90 tumoli of land without any kind of competition.
“One would have expected that an international call for expression of interest for the building and operation of a University would have been issued,” it said.
Such a step would have been the last in a series of steps should have, first, have included the drawing up of a strategy for the development of the tertiary education sector in Malta which takes into consideration not only the provision of tertiary education for the Maltese, but also to foreigners.
“Simplistic comments such as “another university will create competition to the University of Malta” betray a lack of understanding of various impacts that a new university project as proposed would have on the sustainability and quality of the provision of national tertiary education. Such impacts need to be addressed and resolved in a strategy. If the strategy reaches the conclusion that certain issues cannot be resolved satisfactorily for the common good, then the whole concept has to be revised,” the commission said.
Assuming that a large educational project as proposed is in line with this strategy, then a land-use planning process (as part, if required, of the review of the structure plan or local plans) should be carried out to identify the land that needs to be taken up for such a project.
“The first obvious direction would be to designate land for the provision of tertiary education which is inside development zones irrespective of whether it is public land or not. Government can designate such zoned land to qualify for fiscal incentives so that the owners of the land are encouraged to let go of it. This is one way to encourage the use of vacant dwellings and/or land which is within current development zones.”
Following the designation of such an area, then an international call for expression of interest would be issued with all the planning parameters attached to it.
This procedure, it said, would have ensured that the whole concept was embraced by the population at large.
“Unfortunately, the whole process in the proposed project has been opaque, very insensitive to the environment, and its lasting impacts are not clear.”
BAFFLING STATEMENTs ON ZONQOR
The commission said it was baffled at statements that the Zonqor site was the most suitable one for such a development. It is more baffled by statements by Mepa that it was found to be so “after a preliminary assessment”.
“Is Mepa oblivious to its own local plan policies and regulatory obligations?” the commission asked.
“The fact that it is suggested that the university project can only be feasible in the open countryside does not convince much, given that students, the users of the project, will presumably be paying hefty amounts of money for courses. It all depends on the investors’ expectations of the timeframe for the feasibility of the project, which may possibly be anything between 8 and 15 years.”
The commission said the choice of the site disregards the value of the Maltese countryside which parts of the South of Malta still enjoy. Expressions like “abandoned farmland” showed that there was still a dismally low appreciation of the Maltese countryside in certain sectors of society.
“In the not-too-distant past, all areas in Malta were developable according to the whims of the Minister responsible for building permits. Today everybody is a living witness to the impacts of such a policy. Let us keep that dark period in Maltese land-use history as past history which should not be repeated. The gross disrespect to the environment in including large tracts of land for development in the 2006 so-called “rationalisation” exercise should serve as a more recent reminder of how anything-but-rational decisions relating to land-use can have negative long-term consequences on open spaces.”
The commission noted that the proposed project has been presented as providing a planning gain in the form of a national nature park.
“We cannot understand this proposal since the nature park is already designated in the South Local Plan of 2006 The countryside is already there and the best that can be done for the time being, before ecologically restoring some of its areas, is just to leave it alone. As a comparison, when Yellowstone National Park in the USA was declared as a park in the nineteenth century, there was no need to build alongside it an area the size of New York City in order to provide funding for the park. Planning gain is a concept that should be used responsibly and sparingly. It should not be devalued. It is not a substitute for a proper planning process .
CORRESPONDENCE WITH DE PAUL UNIVERSITY
The Commission said it has written to De Paul University, which is only involved in the development of curricula for the new proposed university, asking it to “impress on the developer to make all its efforts, in a sincere, transparent and diligent manner to find an alternative site for the proposed buildings in order to avoid having a negative impact on the countryside, a natural resource which is highly valued in one of the most densely populated countries in the world”.
In its reply, the De Paul University stated that it “has a strong commitment to sustainability in Chicago and [they] will be happy to share [the Commission’s] concerns with [the investors]”.
The commission said it has also communicated its concerns to the investors.