The executive chairman of the Planning Authority was adamant when asked on Times Talk if he had any political interference in his work. Johann Buttigieg said he receives calls to meet both applicants or objectors but ruled out any political interference in the regulator’s decisions.
He recognises that strategic decisions are laid down but the government but assured there is no interference. Sadly, that is hard to believe.
The assurance came to a background of the approval of a monstrous development in Pembroke on the site of the former Institute of Tourism Studies.
The passing on of government land to a hotelier raised many eyebrows as did the sum paid and, even more, the selling price of the apartments to be built. Evidently, the government was more than keen to see the project take off, at the expense of thousands of objectors who will be dwarfed by it.
So, given that background, it is incredible to expect to believe the government, which appoints most of the Planning Board and got the ITS to move out of the way, would have no hand in the final decision.
Mr Buttigieg tells us the PA is autonomous. So autonomous, he says, that it was his decision to fly over, on a private plane, a board member who was on holiday in Sicily.
The Prime Minister did not approve the decision and that too we are expected to believe. So autonomous is the PA that Mr Buttigieg is now having second thoughts about doing that again. “The minister and Prime Minister made their position very clear [that they disagreed with the decision], so I’d be quite an idiot to go against that opinion,” he told this newspaper.
The PA never had it easy on this “densely populated” island, as Mr Buttigieg puts it. He admits there are protests but says they are often not on issues of policy or law.
Sometimes, he says, people protest because others are protesting and cites as an example the City Gate project.
But Pembroke is a different kind of project. Unlike City Gate, where nostalgia and emotions ran high, Pembroke and the environs are home to thousands of people.
The high-rise mega project affects them directly. Mr Buttigieg can speak all he wants about policies and laws but when people there will look out of their windows at a rising monster that will cast a shadow over them, that is not what they think.
They just see for what it is: wrong. Pembroke it is not simply a case of going higher because space is running out. What is technically possible and what is permissive does not necessarily make it right. It was up to the PA board to see reason. But most of them did not.
They looked at policies, laws, heard the talk and, going by what Mr Buttigieg said, the government did not pull any strings.
They were convinced it would be the right thing for Pembroke and voted in favour.
That does not sound like what the PA was set up for.
Once it promoted ideals, irritated many along the way, but it stood for something.
The country’s built heritage, its very identity, is being dismantled and this with the PA’s blessing, from which the government keeps a safe distance, we have been assured.
This is a Times of Malta print editorial