Hundreds were built illegally on private land but the boathouses at St Thomas Bay in Marsascala are set to remain there for the time being.
An action plan to determine how the area should be organised is still being drafted more than a year after it was promised.
But in the words of Alexander Borg, enforcement director at the Malta Environment and Planning Authority, the illegal boathouses are “a problem bigger than Mepa”.
Mr Borg was asked about the boathouses during a Mepa briefing for journalists yesterday on the planning authority’s enforcement actions.
He implied that, at some point, a political decision had to be taken on a final solution for the illegal shanty town, home to about 370 boathouses. A similar political decision was taken a few years back on the Armier boathouses that were also built on public land.
“We have at least stopped building new boathouses and taken action against those built after 1992,” Mr Borg said. The cut-off date represents the year Mepa was set up and the structure plan brought into force.
The south Malta local plan had proposed an action plan be drawn up for the rehabilitation of the St Thomas Bay area. Mr Borg said the study was under way.
Last year, Mepa started discussing the St Thomas Bay action plan after a court ordered it to decide within six months on a request to sanction an illegal boathouse.
These applications cannot be processed without an approved action plan for the area. An authority spokesman had said the action plan would take more than six months to complete. More than a year has passed since then and the plan has not yet been finalised for public consultation. Mr Borg said an action plan for the illegal Armier boathouses had been finalised some years back and a planning application was pending before the authority.
Turning to enforcement, Mr Borg said his directorate started referring some enforcement cases for criminal action by the police. This practice was abandoned over the years after Mepa was set up, he added.
The cases referred for criminal action are normally related to change of use or where direct enforcement action is not feasible. “We had a case of a wedding hall at Tal-Virtù in Rabat where criminal proceedings were started and a quarry in Siġġiewi where tonnes of waste were dumped illegally,” Mr Borg said.
He asked for the law courts to hold special sittings dedicated to environmental cases.
Mepa targets flexible planning
The planning authority wants to adopt a flexible approach to policies in built-up areas to encourage regeneration and job creation.
A proposal will soon be issued for public consultation targeting those grey areas where a plan would fit in with the surrounding neighbourhood but would go against the strictures of the local plan.
In a brief overview of the proposal, Mepa CEO Ian Stafrace said there could be a developer who wanted to turn a dilapidated house into a boutique hotel or an office in an area reserved exclusively for residents by the local plan. The new policy would allow the application to be evaluated within the context of the neighbourhood and whether the proposed new use was compatible with the area.
The consultation document will be released on August 6.