While general attention was inevitably turned to measures against the effects of energy inflation, a rule included in the Aiuti-ter decree passed almost in silence, which in reality may prove to be crucial for the implementation of the NRP. These are a few lines, which insert a new paragraph in last year’s decree law on the governance of the Plan (Legislative Decree 77/2021) and indicate to Invitalia to promote framework agreements “for the assignment of technical services and works” of the administrations public interested by interventions of the NRP. Behind this rule with a gray bureaucratic aspect there is a strategic junction for the effective realization of the investments of the NRP, in the wake of that armor of the Plan that the Draghi government has built to bequeath it to the successors. Let’s see why.
At the forefront the local authorities
The public administrations affected by the law are first of all municipalities and local authorities in general. The Pnrr of the mayors revolves around two key figures: approximately 40 billion euros of investments pass by the Municipalities, and the works must be awarded within next year, otherwise the actual realization of the investments becomes impossible.
The mayors’ alarm
Anyone who knows the times and procedures that in Italy lead from the initial idea of a project to the final assignment to start the work knows well that the intersection of these two data creates a complicated challenge. And among the connoisseurs of the problem there are first of all the mayors, who in fact do not hide a certain alarm. In recent days, the president of Anci Antonio Decaro said that “the mayors are ready for the revolution” in the face of the hypothesis of reviewing the Pnrr by subtracting resources from the municipalities, but he also wrote a letter to all his colleagues asking them to report “delays , anomalies or criticalities “in the projects that affect their institutions: there is also a dedicated mailbox ([email protected]).
The point is that the Municipalities “implementing” Pnrr projects are many, and often do not have staff capable of managing this amount of expenditure also because the “administrative strengthening” initiated by the decree laws on the Plan needs time to be implemented. But there are also many central administrations “owners” of the investments which then develop in a territorial key. And ministry you go, bureaucracy you find, in a complex of procedures, parameters and requests that struggle to find a common language despite attempts at coordination. The rule on Invitalia was created to tackle the two problems together: to support the municipalities that do not make it, and to standardize the activities of preparation, implementation and monitoring of projects. And it doesn’t come out of nowhere.
The idea was developed in the summer at Palazzo Chigi where the alliance with the municipalities worked well, and fully involved the technical secretariat of the NRP created as the management engine of the Plan at the presidency of the Council. The objective is to make structural a joint working method between local administrations and Invitalia which in the first year of the Plan has already involved some of the central chapters of the Mayors’ NRP.