SULMONA. They live on the outskirts but declare that they live in the historic center to pay the lowest rate in the covered car park in Santa Chiara, in Sulmona. They are the “parking thugs”, against whom the Municipality has cracked down in recent days. Of the 241 season ticket holders for the car park, which reopened last March 28 after work on the structure’s pillars, 80 are residents of the historic center of the city, at least on paper. Annual passes for residents of the historic center cost 360 euros, given the 40 percent discount on the rate that had been applied since the time of the administration led by Annamaria Casini. There is also a pink tariff for pregnant women, both residents and non-residents, who, with a simple self-certification, will be able to benefit from a 50% reduction, both for daily passes and for the hourly cost. Everyone else pays around 600 euros a year. The suspicion that someone is “taking advantage” of the first slot has been raised by the car park managers who are calling season ticket holders, one by one, to check their residence certificates.
The outcome of the checks will reach the Municipality which will then have to proceed with the recovery of the sums. In fact, it happened in recent days that a Sulmona resident living in via Cappuccini, a neighborhood near state road 17, had asked for a season ticket as a resident of the historic center. An anomalous case which triggered the consequent checks by the managers. In the meantime, the Municipality has proceeded to reimburse 112 users of the car park who, given the long closure, had asked the authority to get back the sums paid for the annual subscription.
There are a total of 440 parking spaces available in the municipal underground car park which will soon be subject to completion of the works, without the need for closure. The most incisive intervention, which lasted seven months, ended in March and became necessary after the Sulmona firefighters had detected some structural critical issues last August, which have now been overcome with the first tranche of work which cost 140 thousand EUR. In the meantime, investigations by the Sulmona Prosecutor’s Office are continuing, having opened a file in recent months, acquiring documents on the management and maintenance interventions carried out in the last five years. The investigators had moved on the basis of a complaint. For the Municipality, the real challenge is to revitalize the car park. For this reason, in some periods of the year, as happened at Easter, 24-hour openings are foreseen in order to meet the needs of users. In the last week the numbers of car park accesses have also grown due to the high fines issued by the local police in Piazza Garibaldi where many continued to park in the internal ring, despite the bans.
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