ANDRIA – The news disclosed in the press, and endorsed by the Department for Internal and Territorial Affairs of the Ministry of the Interior, seems destined to profoundly shake the social, association, environmental and animal rights fabric of Andria, as well as to further destabilize the already fragile administration municipal.
Expressing concern is the founder of the FAA – Andria Animalist Forum, the activist Savino Montaruli, who declared: “After the municipality of Andria gave up on collecting over 500 thousand euros of TOSAP, given the overwhelming victory of the market street vendors in all the courts, the possible loss of those 850 thousand euros intended for dog shelters would deliver the final blow and would definitively break the city’s government agreements. We care little or nothing about what could happen in the reserved rooms of the Palace what matters to us – continues Montaruli – is the possible loss of long-awaited and indispensable funding for the management of stray animals in the city and to provide those answers that this administration has been promising for four years now and which it has never been able to ensure”.
Montaruli also underlined how the Permanent Table on Stray Animals, of which he is part, no longer met after an initial programmatic meeting in the council chamber. “The fact is that the municipality has closed itself off, armoring itself and closing itself to any institutional interlocution, preferring the perennial personal relationship with those aligned and excluding, with a discriminatory and even persecutory spirit, those independent and autonomous subjects of whom it also makes use when he needs it and is unable to provide answers to the community.”
Montaruli’s criticism is harsh and incisive: “A municipal administration that is ‘terrified’ of making decisions and that fears for its own daily propaganda and image. Without making decisions for the community, however, the risk is that this will happen what is there for all to see: a city without a guide that has no respect even for dogs. It is not for nothing that last June 2nd the citizens preferred to stay with the dogs in Viale Crispi”.
The situation highlights the profound difficulties that the municipal administration of Andria is facing, incapable of effectively managing the funds intended for essential services such as the management of stray dogs. This further misstep risks definitively compromising the trust of citizens and associations in the local government, worsening the political and social crisis of the city.
