Settlement agreement with the Consortium for industrial development, the intervention of Luigi Pavone “Futuro Trivento”. “Last evening the last municipal council of the legislature was held – writes Pavone – to deliberate on the settlement agreement reached by the municipality with the consortium for the repayment of the debt towards the latter. A topic that is particularly close to our hearts, as amply demonstrated in these five years of legislature. Already at the beginning of the legislature, on the occasion of the municipal council of 07/31/2019, in fact, we asked for the calling of a monothematic municipal council in the Piana d’Ischia area to identify a new type of governance of the area regardless of the consortium, an entity that has been absent from 2001 until today and which has not made any investment in the area in these 23 years. We have renewed this request many times in other council meetings in these five years; even, following the receipt of the injunction by the consortium, we asked for the municipality to leave the consortium with a collection of signatures signed by most of the entrepreneurs in the area. With perseverance and conviction we have always asked the administration to seriously address the issue and have repeatedly reiterated the need to leave the consortium to have full autonomy in the management of the area. If the administration had listened to our proposal and our requests, i.e. by resuming direct management of the area, we would have been able to benefit from the funding of around two million euros received from the Molise region to carry out urgent and necessary works in the area, which , however, it was not possible because the consortium did not grant permission to the municipality for the execution of the procedures for awarding and carrying out the works. Regarding this last matter, we underlined from the beginning that the resolution of the regional council which granted the financing erroneously identified the municipality of Trivento as the implementing body, despite the fact that the latter did not have the management of the area, and only after for a long time the region was asked to change the implementing body in favor of the consortium. But it was now too late. This was, in our opinion, a decisive negligence on the part of the administration as it was necessary to immediately take action with the Region and the Consortium to ensure that the latter was the beneficiary of the financing. In this way the financing probably would not have been lost. With hindsight, it seems to us that it was more of a struggle for who should manage the financing and, therefore, the contracts and take credit for the implementation of the interventions and, therefore, attention was paid more to personal glory than to the good of the citizens . Furthermore, leaving the consortium would have made it possible to avoid accumulating further debt for the years from 2017 to today. The injunction, in fact, concerns the losses accumulated by the consortium from 2001 to 2016, therefore it is not clear what will happen with regards to the losses accumulated by the consortium from 2017 to today, if we think that only in the years 2017 and 2018 the consortium has accumulated further losses of 1,112,699 Euros which are equivalent to a further debt of the municipality equal to approximately 267 thousand Euros, given that the municipality has a consortium share of 24% (acquired precisely from the first legislature of Mayor Corallo). Furthermore, we could have already saved around 40 thousand Euros in consortium fees starting from 2020. Regarding the purely legal question, we have always thought, despite our ignorance on the matter, that there could be margins to be winners in this dispute because, as reiterated in more than one municipal council, following the exit from the commissioner phase and the renewal of the statutory positions of the consortium body, in January 2022, we reported how the body in one of its first resolutions inserted a note in the which it was said that all consortium members undertook to pay the membership fees and the approved contributions, including those for covering previous losses. Evidence of this is that, following our report and at the request of the secretary, the mayor sent a note to the consortium in which he contested that act, after a few days earlier, on the occasion of the renewal of the consortium’s board of directors, he even informed the council of this important event and the sending of a letter to those present in which he wished the new board of directors well, reiterating, however, his desire to leave the consortium. Why did the consortium deem it necessary to explicitly include this note in the statute? Has this element been evaluated in the litigation to date? To return to the settlement agreement, the issue relating to the resolution of the agreement between the municipality and the mountain community is not clear. Could the municipality expose itself to further risks of losing? Has a dialogue been started with the mountain community to understand how the follow-up will be managed? The agreement that was ratified yesterday undoubtedly presents numerous advantages, both economic and managerial, as the municipality will finally return, from 1 January 2025, to manage the area. However, there are many elements that we do not yet know because there has been no way to know them, despite the fact that the negotiations began more than a year ago, precisely in March 2023 and the city council, as often happened, was never informed of this. Therefore, the agreement is good (taking it for granted that everything was done for the best from a legal point of view to avoid losing in court), the prospect of direct management of the area starting next January is excellent, also because we ask for it for five years. However, it seems obvious to us that the issue has been handled very badly by the municipal administration and that everything has been extremely neglected for five years. Finally, why was this council called so close to the election campaign? Is the mayor – concludes Pavone – preparing the way to answer for his negligence and carelessness on the issue of the industrial zone? What have you done in these five years when we have repeatedly asked for a discussion, hoping for an exit from the consortium and warning the administration about the constraints and risks that remaining within the consortium would have created for Trivento?
