Attending the event organized by the municipality of Massa on Bolkestein was disheartening: in Italy, the aim is to make the law uncertain and when it is not, we work to make it confusing. Hearing that the Council of State “is particularly bad”, “is harsh” when in its sentences it reiterates something very clear and uninterpretable such as article 12 of the European Directive, I feel a little overwhelmed. I understand that the beach resort owners feel threatened by the deadline, which has in truth already been extended many times, but it is the essential condition for the very concession of a public good. They always knew that what they built on the removable state-owned area would not be theirs forever, but upon the expiry of their authorization would be automatically acquired as state property without any compensation (art. 49 of the Navigation Code).
After 18 years from that 2006 in which the European directive had tried to regulate the concession issue in a community way, in Italy we are still wondering how we can appeal to postpone the comparative procedures indefinitely. The impression is that the concerns of the concessionaires have been the goose that laid the golden eggs for many.
The reflection, obviously avoided, however, is another: if the concessions have expired, they have been illegitimately extended to the deadline since 2009, and with the validity of article 49 of the Navigation Code, for how many years have the concessionaires been allowed to profit from assets that were no longer theirs? Can we talk about immense financial damage suffered as a community by this policy? Now that there are also rulings of the Council of State and national laws that have definitively set the deadline at 12/31/2023 and almost no one is taking action, shouldn’t they pay rent in addition to the fee for the real estate they are using?
