“We close now so as not to close forever.” The president of Ance Marche, Stefano Violoni, cuts short, announcing the blocking of construction sites throughout the region: “For a week, but we are ready to go on to the bitter end”. In less than 24 hours, 200 joined the association’s proposal, but the tam-tam is making the tour of Italy, because the entrepreneurs are talking to each other via chat and the Ance has also been informed of this protest method national team, which this afternoon is planning a meeting with the extraordinary commissioner for post-earthquake reconstruction Giovanni Legnini. The voice is raised by the Marche, which hosts 65% of the largest construction site in Europe, with works still to be carried out for 17.6 billion (out of the 27.3 estimated in the 4 regions affected by the 2016 earthquake), 843 companies engaged on 6,200 construction sites. The blockade of the construction sites is a strong blow to the reconstruction process, which for the 4 years of the post-earthquake has been paralyzed by the bureaucracy and which, in the last two, has enjoyed the strong acceleration given by the orders of the commissioner structure.
Legnini: paradoxical to stop everything now
«It would be paradoxical – says Giovanni Legnini – to stop the construction sites right now that the reconstruction has begun to travel at a brisk pace. This is demonstrated by the 5,200 construction sites authorized and financed last year, in addition to another thousand in the first two months of this year ». Today, the commissioner will submit the draft of the new single price list of the crater, “already revised in recent months”, to the trade associations of construction companies. “Thinking of the citizens who have been waiting for years to return to their homes – observes Legnini – I can only express strong opposition to the blocking of construction sites, while understanding the reasons for the companies that derive from problems completely independent of our will”.
The criticalities of the national building system
“But it is precisely in the Marche construction site that all the critical issues that afflict Italian construction are concentrated and that the governments that have followed one another in the last twenty years have always ignored, there has been a continuous refusal to modify the architecture around construction. : we cannot build and rebuild by putting our hands in the pockets of companies », accuses Violoni. A situation that has decimated construction companies in the last decade, “to the limit of endurance” until a few days ago for the expensive materials (“for us it represented a marked criticality”) and precipitated with the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian war, for the enormous rise in the price of energy, iron and steel. In practice, there is no longer any marginality and companies are closing, also because “the measures taken so far have most often not provided immediate responses and adequate support”. In the extensive dossier prepared by Ance Marche, the criticalities are evident, starting from the impossibility of completing the work within the deadline set by the ordinances with the risk that the client citizens will suffer the revocation of the contribution and the request for revision of the parametric costs and of a Six-monthly updating of the crater price list or, alternatively, the use of regional public works, without which – Violoni closes – «from today we will not sign new contracts».