11.48 – Thursday 9 May 2024
(The following text is taken entirely from the press note sent to the Opinion Agency) –
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PD Councilors Manica and Calzà question the geological assessments and the frightening increase in construction costs.
The more time passes, the more the monstrosity of the construction costs of the Garda cycle path project emerges, which has been in the news for some time, including national ones. From a unit cost per kilometre, initially expected to be around 400,000 euros to the current hypothesis which speaks of 8.5 million euros, especially as regards the Trentino section of this cycle path which insists on crumbly walls, located overlooking the lake and which therefore seems to require particularly onerous solutions.
Starting from this analysis, the Councilors of the PD of Trentino, Alessio Manica and Michela Calzà, have filed a question in the Provincial Council, in order to know the geological assessments relating to the works on the Trentino section; the reasons for the cost increases and their forecasts for the future; the agreements in place with the neighboring Regions for the implementation of the overall project and the distribution of the related costs, as well as the current political guidelines for tourism in our province and which options are intended to be pursued, in the face of the now reached limits of “tourism of mass”.
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Written question no. 332
Subject: GARDA CYCLE ROUTE: COSTS, RISKS AND DAMAGES
For some time now, the Garda cycle path project has been in the news, not only for being a sort of environmental “scar” of unprecedented proportions, but also for the exorbitant costs that its construction would entail. In fact, initially the expenditure forecasts envisaged a cost of 64 million euros for 161 kilometers of cycle path, with an average expenditure therefore equal to 400,000 euros per kilometre, which means a cost greater than double the cost, according to technical comparisons, of a normal cycle path.
In the month of February 2021, this estimate underwent a surge which brought the spending levels to around 300 million euros – 292 million to be exact – due to the works necessary for the construction of walkways, excavations in the mountain and works of made safe and then, the following year, a further increase in spending led to an increase such as to bring the total budgeted costs to the hyperbolic sum of 344 million euros to carry out the entire project, thus bringing the cost of each individual kilometer of track from the initial 400,000 euros to the monstrous figure of 8.5 million euros for a thousand meters of cycle path.
But it is not enough, because the growth in costs, at least as regards the Trentino stretch, is even more stratospheric, in consideration of the need for iron walkways planted on the crumbly rocky walls overlooking the lake and with probable further increases in costs for the safety and constant maintenance of similar works.
If the issues were then to run aground solely on the basis of spending forecasts, many observations could be made in the opposite direction and linked to the prospects of even greater tourism development, assuming that this is possible in an already burdened reality
from an excessive seasonal anthropic load; but what should instead worry ed
to disturb any public administration that is even minimally aware and has some residual sense of responsibility, is the geological question and the serious risks connected to it. The lakeside area affected by the project is in fact exposed to a particular – and well-known – hydrogeological vulnerability, which above all involves the repetition of landslide phenomena, even very significant ones, which put and will put the hypothesized structures and the their use. While leaving aside, for the sake of the country, any further consideration on the landscape disfigurement that would be inflicted on the mountain, it is not possible not to take into consideration the political philosophy that pushes, with growing conviction, towards a model of mass tourism whose characteristics are already known objective limits and which has inflicted so much damage on our territory to date.
In 2023 the “Corriere di Brescia” writes in this regard: “Adding the data from the Brescia, Verona and Trentino sides, 25 million tourist presences were reached”, of which 7 million in Lombardy, 4 in Trentino and 14 in Veneto, with an anthropic density therefore calculated at 244 individuals for every linear meter of the shores of the largest lake in Italy. This is a frightening overload which alone exposes the entire area surrounding the lake to an irreversible and “deadly” upheaval.
But, evidently, not even these technical considerations serve to reflect on the compromised prospects of such a project, because the omnivorous rules of “show tourism” crush any technical, economic, political, scientific and much-vaunted “common sense” objections.
Faced with the criticisms raised several times by the Trentino municipal administrations, the provincial government in office has always maintained that they had expressed themselves, at the time, in favor of the cycle path project and therefore today we are proceeding on the basis of that assent. It’s just a shame that the Provincial Council forgets (deliberately?) that those adhesions at the time concerned an original project – like the one presented at the time by the then Councilor Mauro Gilmozzi – which was developed, for the most part, in tunnels and not on walkways suspended in the void and anchored to a fragile and dangerous mountain. As always, the manipulation of the truth leads to bending it to the convenience of one party, but does not do development a good service.
And so we arrive at the present day, with the crazy increase in costs mentioned above and with the disappearance of even the slightest caution regarding a project that is extremely risky for everyone, in the name of the profit of a few. Perhaps no one remembers anymore how that same greedy profit generated dramas and tragedies like that of Stava in 1985, with the collapse of the settling basins of the Prestavèl mines and which still tells us of 268 innocent victims of a senseless search for profit.
If on the one hand, in the name of collective safety, the Provincial Council approves a law which provides for the possibility of culling large carnivores to protect the public interest, on the other hand it promotes and supports the obvious risk of a cycle path clinging to overhanging walls , in a geography with very high hydrogeological risk.
Aware of how little consideration is given to coherence and responsibility in the areas of the current provincial government,
Having said all this, the Provincial Council is asked to find out
– on the basis of which reliable and certified geological assessments it was decided to create the project for a cycle path on the shores of Lake Garda, as described in the introduction;
– on the basis of which precise and detailed economic and/or technical events the realization prices of the potential project have increased almost six times, in the space of approximately two years and how much they are expected to increase further, before the conclusion of the project process planned works;
– what are the current political guidelines for the tourism sector in the province of Trento and for the current legislature, given that to date no serious and organic political proposal has been drawn up in this regard and what options are intended to be pursued, in the face of the evident limits reached by the so-called “mass tourism”;
– what agreements are in place or in planning with the neighboring regional territories of Lombardy and Veneto for the construction of the cycle path in question and with what possible divisions of the general construction costs.
In accordance with the regulations, a written response is required.
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Alessio Manica Michela Calzà
Council of the Autonomous Province of Trento (PD of Trentino)
 – QUESTION * CICLOVIA GARDA: « ON THE BASIS OF WHICH TECHNICAL EVENTS HAVE THE PRICES INCREASED SIX TIMES? »){kind=link}