Transport Minister Ian Borg has refused to provide Parliament with all planning documents related to the controversial decision to narrow Mellieħa Bypass and make way for a new service road.
His reason? It is “humanly impossible” to do so.
The refusal was given in reply to a parliamentary question filed by Opposition MP and former Mellieħa mayor Robert Cutajar.
The issue revolves around a number of Planning Control (PC) applications from 2013 onwards, for the zone on the outskirts of the village known as Ta’ Masrija.
Through this process, a partial review of a 2006 planning policy for the area was approved by means of PC 46/13. New road alignments, land uses and building heights at the site were among the changes which resulted from this application.
Subsequently, further changes were made through similar applications, which were mainly related to the shifting of private open spaces and changes in certain alignments.
These modifications had largely gone under the radar until last March when a controversy erupted over the decision to sacrifice one lane of the Mellieħa Bypass, (Triq Louis Wettinger) for the construction of a public road servicing a massive block of 152 apartments.
The decision was announced through a parliamentary question, in which the Transport Minister told Mr Cutajar that the new service road was the result of changes enacted through PC 46/13. At the time the minister defended the decision, which in actual fact meant the creation of a bottleneck in an arterial road, saying it was meant to improve road safety.
Faced with a public outcry over the decision, the government announced a €2 million project to reconstruct the bypass while promising to retain the four-lane configuration.
While at the time this decision raised eyebrows, it recently transpired that it would come at a cost, as the speed limit in this part of the bypass would be halved to 40km/h as it became narrower.
Doubts on the planning process also emerged when halfway through the road reconstruction project, which is almost complete, the service road just constructed had to be demolished in order to be shifted by a couple of metres.
Meanwhile, the Opposition MP filed a series of follow-up questions in which he requested Mr Borg to table all documents related to the PC applications.
In his reply, the Transport Minister said this would entail “a large amount of human resources and time” and for this reason it was considered “humanly impossible” to provide all the requested information.
Mr Borg added that the correspondence between Transport Malta and the Planning Authority, as part of the process to ensure that all planning policies were adhered to, was “voluminous”.
The Transport Minister expressed his hope that the MP had not filed the question in an attempt to cast doubts on the hundreds of employees of the two authorities.
Asked for his reaction Mr Cutajar said that the minister had found no similar objections to table other voluminous PC applications including PC46/13 and several large projects.
“While I have complete trust in all PA and TM employees I do not exclude that some employees or even others who are no longer on their books know much more than the minister on the matter,” he said.
Asked to elaborate he declined to give further details.