TRENT. The management costs of Eugenio Monti trackestimated at 1.5 million per year, after the Olympic Games? They are also supported through the funds of neighboring municipalities. This possibility, which had already been hypothesized in the past and remained rather in the shadows, has now been put in black and white. There is the draft agreement in Official bulletin of the Veneto Region, number 65 of 05/21/2024. But there are very high doubts about the opportunity of being able to use the resources to “make up” the deficit generated by the Cortina project. The document is vague and there is another question? If the agreement did not only concern the facility intended to host the bobsleigh, luge and skeleton races?
But let’s go in order. Already in 2019 it emerged that there was a letter of intent between Trentino, Alto Adige and Veneto for the coverage of management costs. A 15-year agreement through also the Border Municipalities Fund. This hypothesis always remained in the background until the mayor of Cortina d’Ampezzo, Gianluca Lorenzicommented that “I don’t sleep at night thinking about the bills to maintain the track and the risk of default by the Municipality”.
We are in February and the following month the senator Gianni Rosa intervened in parliament to point out that “the vice president of the Veneto Region has already clarified that the management will be responsibility of the Province of Trento and Bolzano, of sports federations and the Veneto Region“. But the matter remained an unknown, until the last few hours.
The clues have become an agreement: “The Provinces of Trento and Bolzano undertake to support, for financial years between 2027 and 2046an annual amount determined within the planning, to guarantee the continuity of the sporting use of the recovered facility, allocating specific resources within the Border Municipalities Fund”.
We would therefore draw on the “treasure” from 80 million. It’s about resources made available to neighbors under the Milan Agreement and the Stability Pact. Years of the attacks on autonomy and a period in which the border territories had begun to ask to be able to move to the provinces of Trento and Bolzano.
Thus a Fund was defined with a constitutional provision that is part of the Trentino Statute to calm the waters and make up for the infrastructural gap of 48 neighboring municipalities in the Province of Belluno, Brescia, Vicenza And Sondrio. A mechanism included in the 2010 budget and clarified in 2014 for an intervention worth 40 million from Trentino and the same from Alto Adige: every year 500 thousand euros are distributed in a fixed amount plus other investments.
“Let’s start with the problem of method”, comments a the Dolomites The MP Dario Bond, delegated to the Joint Committee for the management of the agreement for the neighboring mutual fund. “The form is not good because we find ourselves contributing through the Fund without there having been any communication. We found ourselves with an agenda and an official bulletin without having been asked for an opinion. Furthermore, the amount is not specified, all we’re talking about is that the annual maintenance costs will be supported in a post-Olympic perspective.”
And there would be a problem. A constraint of no small importance. “An administrative, technical and bureaucratic node”, continues Bond. “The intervention concerns maintenance costs, therefore current ones that require ready cash availability. But the mechanism of the Fund is different and this measure is designed for investment expenses. A change requires the law to be changed in parliament. Then you can also think about the possible modification because the Municipalities, especially the smaller ones, do not have economic strength and these resources could be useful for financing mobility projects, for example. The quality of life depends on a balance of servicesbut today this money cannot be touched for these objectives.”
The title of Annex A of the Bur leaves the MP perplexed. The document is “Management program agreement template, post-Olympic promotion and valorisation of the ‘Eugenio Monti sliding centre‘ and the other Olympic works built in the municipality of Cortina d’Ampezzo and the autonomous provinces of Trento and Bolzano”. In short, the outlines of the agreement are vague. Could the Fund fuel the management of more works?
“This worries us: there are no figures and everything is very vague. This risks putting the territories in difficulty in planning investments”, concludes Bond.
