The Council rejects the Venetian appeal against the landscape armouring imposed by the Ministry of Environmental Heritage
COMELICO SUPERIORE. Do you have to enclose a vegetable garden? You cannot do it, if you are not authorized by the Superintendency. Do you have a flue to renew? Pass, again, through Venice. Especially if you have to build a new house. You cannot make the new thermal coat, if the Superintendency does not give you the ok. These (and other) landscape constraints, imposed a year and a half ago on the Municipalities of Comelico and Auronzo by the Ministry of Environmental and Cultural Heritage, will not be removed.
The Region appealed, a year ago, to enforce its less restrictive planning, but the Constitutional Court actually confirmed them. The Regions – we read in sentence no. 164 filed yesterday (editor Augusto Barbera) – they cannot plan the development of their territory with urban planning choices except when the latter are respectful of the constraints set by the State to protect assets of landscape value.
Furthermore, the State can adopt the declaration of landscape interest of an asset even when the Region is against it. In fact, the protection of these assets responds to an “incremental logic”, which allows the Regions to broaden their scope but not reduce it, not even by means of landscape plans of regional competence, to be drawn up in agreement with the State.
The Court acknowledged that not even the circumstance that the landscape plan of the Region is in the process of being approved can deprive the State of its power to indicate the assets to be protected. They must therefore be included in the regional plan without changes. It was therefore concluded that the declaration of notable public interest in the Comelico area fell within the constitutional powers of the State towards the Region and therefore the appeal proposed by Veneto was rejected.
This means that, as has been the case for a year, any intervention that modifies the landscape in some way must go through the Superintendency. Not only the large system, such as the ski connection with Val Pusteria, or the construction of a road, perhaps urgent and limited to the measures of a forest track, but also the restoration of a house, the simple painting of a facade, the change color of the shutters, the construction of the smallest fireplace. You cannot decide on your own to transform the vegetable garden into a garden (or vice versa), nor to enclose it with a net instead of a fence.
This means that the project can be set up, even if it has no impact, must be delayed by a minimum of 4 or 5 months and up to years. The owner of a practice brings the project to the Municipality. The technical office waits for other dossiers to accumulate to pass them to the examination of an enlarged commission, which also includes a representative of the Superintendency. If the dossier receives the go-ahead, the Municipality forwards it to Venice, where it will receive the definitive examination. It is evident that if the intervention is complex, months, if not the year, pass before a response.
«This pronouncement of the Consulta», comments the regional councilor Cristiano Corazzari, «does nothing but contrast that principle of autonomy that we have repeatedly claimed, even in the urban and landscape fields. This happened, in particular, in the negotiations for autonomy started with the State, in which we asked for the possibility of taking over the management of the Superintendencies, that is to say the landscape sector, in the face of a deep knowledge that the Region has of its territory and a strong synergy established with the communities. This is in order to avoid the imposition of restrictions and defined impositions by the Ministry that are not shared with the territory. Situations that, as we well know, can create significant problems or obstacles on very important fronts, such as the development of the territories, tourist development and the possibility of giving a concrete future to the territories themselves “.
For Corazzari there are no doubts: the principle affirmed by the Consulta goes in the direction of a centralism that Veneto has always fought against. Not only that, this sentence interprets a concurrent competence such as that of Planning, justifying the identification of constraints by the Ministry as a constitutional attribution in the matter of environmental protection, reserved to the exclusive legislative competence of the state by article 117.