When the Planning Authority organises a ‘public consultation’ meeting on the Paceville master plan and its officials get jeered and booed at by the crowd then something is definitely amiss.
The non-government organisations are very clear of what they think of the plan: scrap it. Which would be a fine thing to do considering that the document appears to be primarily focused on catering for nine high-rise projects, replacing the many businesses and homes in Paceville by ‘open space’. However, scrapping it will also come at a cost. Over €300,000 in a direct order to consultants Mott MacDonald and Broadway Maylan, not to mention the numerous adverts promoting the plan.
The impact of the Paceville master plan took some time to sink in. The implications only trickled out in stages: the high-rise would require 15,000 new parking spaces, land appropriation would cost some €150 million and there is a proposal for a new peninsula created through land reclamation at Portomaso next to a marine special area of conservation. There was also talk of an underground tunnel network to mitigate the inevitable traffic congestion.
Things came to a head when a report in this newspaper said that Mott MacDonald had worked on a development project by Gozitan entrepreneur Joe Portelli, who plans to transform 80,0000 square metres of land in Paceville into skyscraper development. This apparent conflict of interest was raised during a meeting of Parliament’s Environment and Development Planning Committee where the Paceville story got murkier and murkier. It emerged that Mott MacDonald had actually verbally flagged its ‘conflict of interest’ to the Planning Authority that commissioned the plan but was told to go ahead.
PA executive chairman Johann Buttigieg assured the MPs present there was no such conflict and that the proposals did not result from any undue influence from third parties.
Interestingly, Parliamentary Secretary Deborah Schembri, who is responsible for planning, distanced herself from the whole matter and said that had she known of this, she would have stopped the commissioning at its inception.
Complicating the story even further, it also emerged that Mott MacDonald was awarded the contract on the strengthen of a call for expressions of interest for an integrated transport strategy, the terms of reference for which were changed to a Paceville master plan during the adjudication process.
Faced with this convoluted situation, Dr Schembri could only say that the master plan would be ‘reviewed’ and that everything was still at consultation stage. That did not put anyone’s mind at rest.
Effectively, the €300,000 direct order has turned up to be one whole mess, with the Opposition calling on Dr Schembri to shoulder political responsibility. She said the Opposition’s call was disproportionate and frivolous and also pointed to the PA’s ‘autonomy’, effectively passing the buck on to its executive chairman, who ostensibly told no one from the government side about the potential problem.
The process through which the plan was commissioned was questionable at best. The end result looks like a dreamland wish list, has been widely rejected by the many people affected and doubts have been sown in people’s minds on a potential conflict of interest.
The issue is not whether there was any third-party influence but that there was a perceived conflict that was ignored. Someone has to shoulder responsibility for this, for ignoring the warning signs and for cutting corners. If Dr Schembri will not move aside, then she should tell Mr Buttigieg, her man at the PA helm, to do so himself.
It’s called accountability.