A “Pact for Naples”, with the commitment of the Pd secretary Enrico Letta and the leader in pectore M5s Giuseppe Conte to save the Neapolitan capital from financial default with a liability exceeding 5 billion euros. An important move by the leaders of the two parties to indicate, step by step, the moves to put the city back on its feet and start a new era after the De Magistris management. An era under the banner of former minister Gaetano Manfredi.
Here is the full text of the unitary document, which also sees the signature of Minister Speranza.
“There are not only major projects among the country’s aspirations. Italians also aspire to efficient transport, sheltered and clean roads, nursery schools, centers for the elderly, sports facilities, public parks and conditions of daily life adequate to the best international standards. In summary, they ask for services.
Municipalities generally provide them. While Italy is courageously facing the restart, politics cannot ignore the relaunch of the bodies closest to the needs of citizens.
In this historical moment, Naples is the city that presents the greatest economic and social criticalities. The paradox is that it is also the right laboratory for development. By investing in Naples, exalting it, making it fully a European city, while retaining its extraordinary cultural characteristics, we are doing a service to the whole of Italy. And not only for symbolic reasons, albeit very valid, of closeness between North and South, of the common good, of national unity. The investment in Naples is an investment for the country since it represents the starting point, concretely experimental, of a turnaround applicable to all cities – large, medium or small – in difficulty. If Naples starts again, Italy of Municipalities starts again.
The analysis of the economic and financial situation of the Municipality of Naples seems to make three legislative interventions at the state level necessary and urgent aimed at making debt management sustainable based on the principles of solidarity, territorial cohesion and intergenerational equity:
1. A procedure for the commissioner management of the debt of the City of Naples (on the basis of a model that intervenes on the capital municipalities of the Metropolitan City as strategic assets of the national economic system), along the lines of the one in place since 2008 for Rome.
2. The extension to the entire three-year period 2021-2023 and the increase from 500 million to at least 1 billion per year of the Fund to support the budget balance of local authorities, whose establishment is provided for by Legislative Decree no. 73 of 2021 (so-called support-bis);
3. One Extraordinary plan for the recruitment and retraining of staff by local authorities, with particular reference to professionals with specific qualifications.
These interventions should be combined with a strengthening of tools recently introduced by legislation to facilitate the management of the debt of local authorities:
1. Fund for entities in financial difficulty attributable to the socio-economic conditions of the territories;
2. Fund for the contribution to the payment of the debt of the capital municipalities of the metropolitan cities;
3. Start of the restructuring of the debt of local authorities with takeover by the State.
The gaps due to the social and territorial characteristics that characterize the various realities of our country must be addressed through a structural strengthening of the vertical equalization mechanism that compensates for the weaknesses of fiscal capacities. In Naples, essential levels of performance must be ensured in the fields of Education, Social Services, Public Transport and Land Management. The contribution of the State to reducing the differential between the needs and fiscal capacity of the Municipalities becomes fundamental.
On the collection side, it becomes crucial to implement the recent reform that has given municipalities new and incisive tools, with a drastic reduction in the time of assessment. This reform must be implemented with an adequate reorganization of the municipality of Naples, with the strengthening of all the offices in charge of local collection.
COMMISSION MANAGEMENT
Naples must become a national laboratory in which to experiment a new model of intervention and debt management in favor of the capital municipalities of Metropolitan Cities.
This intervention finds a precedent in the commissioner’s management of the debt of Roma Capitale.
Goal is to introduce two distinct two managements, separated from each other:
– a Commissioner management – entrusted to a Government Commissioner – who would take over all the relevant revenues and all the obligations assumed at a certain date;
– a Ordinary management, competent for the period subsequent to the aforementioned date, and entrusted to the institutional bodies of the Municipality.
The Government Commissioner would proceed todefinitive assessment of the debt of the municipality of Naples, in order to draw up, within a certain period, the plan for the repayment of previous liabilities of the municipality, updated in terms of certain, liquid and due receivables.
In light of the size of the debt of the municipality of Naples and of the quotas to be recovered in each year – based on the PRFP and the additional measures – it would be necessary allocate a budget of not less than 150 million euros per year to finance the commissioner’s management.
On the basis of the model used for the Municipality of Rome, most of this endowment should be guaranteed by a annual contribution from the state; another part would be financed by the establishment of additional commissioners (to IRPEF and other local taxes, including boarding fees at Capodichino airport or at the Port of Naples).
FUND FOR SUPPORTING THE BUDGETARY BALANCE OF LOCAL AUTHORITIES
The DL supports-bis (decree-law of 25 May 2021, no. 73 “Urgent measures connected to the emergency from COVID-19, for businesses, work, young people, health and local services”) provides in art. 52 the establishment of a fund for the reduction of the deficit of local authorities which worsened their administrative result in 2019 compared to the previous year following the reconstitution of the Liquidity advance fund as of 31 December 2019, as required by the Constitutional Court sentence no. 80 of 2021.
In particular, the new Fund:
– is established in the forecast of the Ministry of the Interior with a dotation of 500 million euros for the year 2021;
– it is restarted by decree of the Minister of the Interior, in agreement with the Minister of Economy and Finance, in agreement with the State, City and Local Autonomous Conference among the entities that in 2019 they had a larger deficit from replenishment of the Cash Advance Fund more than 10% of the current revenue ascertained in 2019.
In order to better support the rehabilitation process of the local authorities in question, it appears necessary to increase – with a specific amendment to the bill converting the support decree-bis – the endowment of the Fund to a billion per year for each of the years of the entire three-year period 2021-2023.
EXTRAORDINARY PLAN FOR THE RECRUITMENT OF STAFF
An extraordinary plan for the recruitment of staff by local authorities appears necessary and urgent in the light of the obvious lack of their administrative capacity to collect their income, manage their assets and above all of plan and manage European and national resources for investment purposes it is historically insufficient, especially in the central-southern regions.
The repeated interventions of the legislator, especially starting from 2010 (DL n.78 / 2010), to contain the costs of public personnel at all administrative levels, through the introduction of stringent limits to the recruitment of personnel (blocking of turn-over ), have further compromised this capacity and reduced the investment expenditure of local authorities.
In recent years, however, the legislator has shown awareness of the need to reverse a trend which, although determined by the need to contain public spending after the crises of the years 2008-2010, has led to results that are difficult to sustain.
The Plan could be centered around one appropriate extension and financing of article 1, paragraph 179-184 of the budget law for 2021, to be implemented during the conversion of the support law bis or into the budget law 2022.
This provision allowed, notwithstanding the limits set by current legislation, hiring of personnel functional to the administrative regeneration necessary for the strengthening of territorial cohesion policies in the South. The law, to ensure the definition and implementation of the interventions provided for by the Community and national cohesion policy for the 2014-2020 and 2021-2027 programming cycles, allows all public entities involved in the planning and management activities of the Abruzzo regions, Basilicata, Calabria, Campania, Molise, Puglia, Sardinia, Sicily, of hire non-managerial staff with certain skills, through specific insolvency procedures.
Considering the new tasks that local authorities will be called upon to carry out for the purposes of implementing the PNRR and the related needs to strengthen their administrative capacity, it could be possible, in line with the provisions of the aforementioned provisions, to allow all local authorities to proceed with the hiring of qualified personnel notwithstanding the limits set by current legislation.
Specific ones should be identified at the same time resources to meet these recruitments, also from the appropriations provided for in the PNRR.
In this regard, it should be emphasized that – although the governance of the PNRR has not yet been defined (it should be the subject of a forthcoming government decree-law) – according to the indications of the Minister of Economy and Finance, the local authorities would be involved in the management of 80 billion euros, equal to about one third of the total resources).
Giuseppe Conte, Enrico Letta, Roberto Speranza