Existing planning safeguards have failed and the Planning Authority ought to be disbanded altogether, an environmental activist has argued.

“We are sinking into controlled anarchy, with a strong hand deciding who evades control and who has to submit to it,” Flimkien Għal Ambjent Aħjar coordinator Astrid Vella wrote in a Talking Point published today.

In a blistering attack on the Planning Authority, Ms Vella asked why two Environment and Planning Commission boards had been reduced to one, and accused one PA working group of being populated by “some of the most notorious architects in practice”.

READ: Talking Point: Heading for Controlled Anarchy

Ms Vella pointed to a controversial application to add six floors to an early 1800s house along the Sliema Ferries seafront as a case in point. The proposal, Ms Vella wrote, violates a PA policy stating that “proposals for new high buildings [along the Sliema and St Julian’s seafront] having a facade width that is less than 25 metres will not be permitted”. The building in question is 5.11 metres wide, she noted.

The Planning Appeals Board and Sanitary Board had previously refused the project, and the PA’s Cultural Heritage Advisory Committee had also come out against it. The project’s case officer, Kevin Borda, had initially recommended refusal.

But despite this apparently overwhelming opposition, Ms Vella wrote, the EPC chair was “very receptive” to developers at the project hearing “and immediately after the session, the case officer’s refusal was changed to recommended approval”.

Ms Vella predicted that the project would be given the green light by the EPC at its hearing, scheduled to take place on Friday.

“It is not surprising that Sliema residents are disgusted,” she wrote. Residents dismayed at the destruction of historic townhouses in the locality have said that they will be staging a symbolic walkabout on Saturday to highlight development concerns.

“I thought that, imperfect as it was, the Planning Authority prevented Malta from sinking into uncontrolled anarchy,” Ms Vella wrote. “I was wrong”.

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