The Administrative Court of Valle d’Aosta confirms the discretion recognized by the legislator on the distance meter
The Tar of the Aosta Valley has once again dealt with the “distance meter” introduced by the regional law against gambling. Also on this occasion the sentence is in favor of the application of the legislation.
The Regional Administrative Court ruled on the appeal of a company that intended to open a horse racing betting agency in Quart, in the Amérique area, with a change in the intended use of a commercial space from a disco to a betting room. The procedures started in February 2019 and the building permit was obtained in January 2020, the company’s plans came to a halt in May, when the Municipality of Quart included a physiotherapy studio and some recreational-sports activities in the map of “sensitive places” located less than 500 meters from the future agency. As a result of this decision, the Aosta Police Headquarters denied the issue of the betting license.
The company opposed the choices made by the Municipality of Quart regarding “sensitive places”. For the Aosta Valley Tar, however, the appeal is unfounded. According to the administrative judges, in fact, “the municipal choice of sensitive places does not appear unreasonable or exorbitant from the primary regulatory perimeter” and, consequently, that of the Aosta Police Headquarters not to authorize horse racing betting in the former discotheque.
As already established in two other judgments of 2020, the TAR also rejected the findings on the constitutional legitimacy of some articles of the regional law against gambling addiction. “The discretion granted to the legislator in choosing which criterion for measuring the distance from” sensitive “places to adopt, among those abstractly possible, does not therefore seem to have been exercised in an unreasonable way”, the judges write. In particular, “the adoption of the criterion for measuring distance as the crow flies does not in itself seem inconsistent or contradictory with respect to the purpose pursued by the legislator, namely that of preventing gambling addiction by” removing “the points where public gaming is gathered from “sensitive” places ».
Furthermore, the sentence still reads, “there is no disproportion reported between the protection of health and the freedom of enterprise, because the assumption has remained unproven that the adoption of the criterion for measuring the distance as the crow flies would prevent the ‘exercise of the game throughout the region ».
Elena Giovinazzo
.