Updated 4.27pm

Hard Rock Hotels should live up to their motto - ‘“Love All – Serve All, All is One, Take Time To Be Kind, Save the Planet” - and stand up for Pembroke residents living in the looming shadow of db Group’s plans for the former ITS site, the Church’s environmental commission has said.

In a damning indictment of the mega-project proposals, the Commission urged the multinational group, which is earmarked to operate a hotel at the site, to use its clout to urge db Group to rethink the project.

“Hard Rock Hotels’ motto is almost offensive and insensitive to the Pembroke community, which would suffer all the negative impacts of this development if this proposal were to be approved,” the Commission said.

Commission chairman Mario Camenzuli has written a letter to Hard Rock International chairman Jim Allen, asking him to “oblige developers to rethink the project proposal”.

READ: db Group's tunnel plans revealed in parliament

The Church commission’s four-page assessment of the project is sharply critical of existing planning policies and their regulator, asking “whose interest is the Planning Authority protecting?”

Instead of long-term planning, the Commission said, the PA is adopting a piecemeal approach.

It bemoaned Malta’s descent into what it describes as a “post-planning era”, with projects negotiated and commitments made before "rigorous studies and effective public consultation are carried out", and accuses the government of seeking to “hijack the planning process” by stretching the interpretation of existing polices “to absurd lengths”.

Mega-projects such as that proposed for the former ITS site, the Commission argued, made talk of masterplans or local plans redundant.

Local plans, last revised in 2006 but drafted in the years preceding that, no longer reflected Malta in 2018 and urgently required revision, it argued.

The Commission highlighted some key objections it had to the db Group plans:

1. Developers’ failure to respect the floor-to-area ratio, with buildings higher than they ought to be and less public open space than claimed.

2. Little to no consideration for the impact the massive-scale project would have on traffic, residents living in its shadows, or the area’s visual landscape.

3. The fact that the project is so large that major infrastructural projects would be required to effectively address the volume of traffic the development would generate.

4. Potential negative impact to a Natura 2000 site nearby.

 

Developers have faced staunch resistance to their plans, with three local councils, various NGOs and masses of residents making it clear they will be opposing the project every step of the way. The Planning Authority received over 4,000 formal objections to the project.

Malta’s two major political parties, on the other hand, seem less troubled by db Group’s plans: the government handed developers the land for the project in a controversial deal which is being investigated by Malta’s auditor-general, while Nationalist Party leader Adrian Delia has said he has no problem with the project provided that it abides by planning rules.

In its position paper, the Church commission reiterated its calls for the government to fund a national study into Malta’s property market – an appeal it first made more than two years ago. A similar study published by the developers’ lobby had ignored the property market’s environmental and social impact, the Commission said.

It also urged the government to be responsible with the way it managed public land, and argued that companies had to go beyond mottos and corporate social responsibility photo-ops.

 

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.