We refer to the article on the front page (April 4) entitled Transport Malta’s Saga Of Neglect. It has sadly become fashionable for TM to be portrayed as neglectful of the public’s needs and generally “arrogant”, an attitude attributed to us a number of times, sometimes unfairly.
Our mission is to meet customer’s needs but we have to balance what individuals may perceive as their “rights” with our obligation to use the limited resources allocated to us in the best possible public interest. This effort sometimes makes us look less than mindful of individual needs as is the case reported on.
The client in this case owns a property which faces a downhill street. Whenever it rains, water streams in the direction of his property. What’s more the customer developed his property below the street levels which means that in his case the situation is even worse than would be the case in the normal course of things. We acknowledge that the client contests our position on this matter.
Whether we agreed or not we have heeded his complaint and proposed solutions intended to mitigate the client’s problem. We cannot altogether compensate for the natural laws of gravity. And we certainly cannot propose solutions that cause new problems to the client’s neighbours. So no solution is likely to be entirely watertight if the pun may be excused.
In any case the client refused to appoint his own architect to consider our proposals and refused, until a week ago, to acknowledge that the solution we propose is to his satisfaction. It is not unlikely that what is considered as a “saga of neglect” and what The Times has reported as fact, will not, in the view of the client, end when we complete our works. Things will get better but rainwater will not all of a sudden start to flow uphill.
It has taken months to attempt to explain this to the client. The client, as is his right, called the Ombudsman to represent his interests. We are grateful for the Ombudsman’s intervention as his good offices secured the client’s acceptance of our designs just last week. Within a few days of receiving that confirmation we started tendering procedures and expect to deliver on our commitment by June.
We hope this will satisfy the client but experience teaches us that even for us, the saga might just go on.