Taranto and Sulcis: European funds for the transition are at a standstill

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The plan for the environmental transition in Taranto and Sulcis, between postponements and updates, is going slowly. Indeed, it is essentially stuck at a standstill. Between the complexity of the intervention, delays in regional and national planning, overlapping skills and ownership, we are looking to the October window for a remodulation and an “extension of time”. On the website of the programme, whose responsibility following the abolition of the Cohesion Agency is headed by the Department for Cohesion Policy of the Presidency of the Council, not even the name of the managing authority appears yet, an indispensable figure according to the European regulations.

For the moment, therefore, nothing has been spent of the resources foreseen by the Just transition fund financed by European cohesion policy and which for the two areas to be “reborn” in Sardinia and Puglia are worth more than a billion.

The Sulcis referrals

The Sulcis administrators had to deal with “a mix of skills” and twice asked for a postponement of the terms of the tender for environmental remediation. «There were the regional elections – clarifies Pietro Morittu, mayor of Carbonia and member of the supervisory committee of the Jtf program – and then also a series of issues ranging from the delays accumulated by the Region in recent years to obstacles regarding skills. In many cases, in fact, some projects, such as the reclamation project, were revised because we did not have complete ownership of the area to be restored and therefore it was discovered that it might not be financed.” However, other chapters remain open: «We presented the project for the reclamation in time, even if the deadline was then extended – he adds -, but we still don’t know how to proceed with the project for the renewable energy communities, because the Region has not yet prepared the tenders”.

Taranto and the bottlenecks

The delays also worry Rinaldo Melucci, mayor of Taranto who is keen to underline how his Municipality has “done its homework in time by pursuing a model of sustainable and circular development”.

«I don’t want to raise controversy at any institutional level, but certainly some precious time has been lost in terms of governance and operation of the various technical tables – he says -. There is no point in rushing and producing an incredible amount of documentation and simulations if the bottlenecks are located in a regional capital or in a ministry. As a country system we must improve in this, European funds and policies are essential and fundamental opportunities, not levers of power towards the territories”.