by Anna Marchetti
The Ministry of Infrastructure revokes the 20 million euros of the Gimarra Variation and invites the Municipality “to return to the Marche Region the sums paid as an advance” (around 500 thousand euros). The letter, signed by the director general of the Ministry, arrived in the Municipality on Tuesday, also addressed to the Marche Region, the Province and for information to the Presidency of the Council of Ministers. In particular, the letter writes that “the intervention was included among those to be defunded as it has no legally binding obligation as of 30 June 2023”. To then add: “While waiting for Cipes (the inter-ministerial committee from which the cohesion and development funds came) to formalize the defunding, the assigned resources are revoked” and the Municipality is invited to return the sums advanced by the Region.
The Ministry’s letter merely formalizes what was already essentially decided. In December 2023, in fact, the last chance to recover the 20 million euros that the Municipality had allocated to the Gimarra Variation, the road which, cutting through the Carmine and Gimarra hills, was supposed to free the center from through traffic, bringing it on State Road 16. A second extension requested by the administration, after the first which expired on 30 June, could only have been obtained with a government provision, within the ‘milleproroghe’ Decree: a provision which did not exist. At this point the Municipality only has to say goodbye to the 20 million euros, the result of the agreement signed in 2018 between the Municipality and the Region. Furthermore, he will have to return to the Region that had advanced them, the approximately 500 thousand euros already spent: the sum could be recovered from the budget surplus (approximately 5 million).
With the revocation of the financing – it had never happened before – not even the tender announced by the Municipality for the executive project and for the awarding of the works on the Gimarra road will have been followed: a work worth 25 million euros, 20 from Cipes financing and 5 of the Municipality’s administrative surplus. In reality, the tender has been frozen for some time and the envelopes have never been opened and, given the revocation of the financing, they never will be. All those citizens who opposed the infrastructure are breathing a sigh of relief even if the bitterness of having lost 20 million euros remains, one of the most important funds received by the city of Fano, after the 50 million allocated by the Region to the coplanar south and the 25 million, again from the regional body, for the construction of the emergency building. The opposition had long suggested, with the Region also agreeing, to divert those 20 million euros onto the southern coplanar road, but the majority, albeit with many internal differences, never wanted to question the Gimarra Variation.
For his part, Cristian Fanesi, candidate for Fano’s centre-left coalition, limits himself to highlighting what he considers suspicious timing on the part of a ministry “managed by the minister and secretary of the Northern League, the same party as Serfilippi”. And then he defends the validity of the now vanished intervention: “The work that has always been foreseen in the city’s regulatory plans – he observes – represents a solution that is not for a few but for everyone and which represents a necessary connection to reduce traffic from Porta Maggiore in Gimarra and to make that stretch of highway even safer”. Evaluations that are now sterile, for which however Fanesi sees a glimmer of hope: “The Municipality of Fano – he announces – has taken steps to request access to the documents from the Marche Region to evaluate the reasons and the administrative path of the provision in order to reserve a possible appeal”.
