Campaign For A Living Venice

Bids for construction will reopen now that the money denied by the EU for the PNRR will be covered by the national government. After a six-month delay construction is projected to start in early 2024. While the Mayor celebrates, representative Zanella has filed a complaint with the Corte dei Conti and City Councilor Martini has written a letter to PM Meloni

By Mitia Chiarin

On July 4 the Ministry of the Interior published the decree which along with the Ministry of the Economy and Finance and the Ministry for European Affairs, the South, cohesion policies and the PNRR allocates 93,581,321,26 Euro to finance the “Bosco dello Sport” project. The money, equivalent to the sum blocked by the European Commission, will instead be drawn from the Funds for Integrated Urban Plans and the Complementary National Plan.

The project will be built at Tessera, and calls for, overall, the building of a 16 thousand seat stadium, a 10 thousand seat arena, completion of the new Tessera-Airport road, internal urbanization work, greenery and landscaping, and an educational area. All of the commercial and management components have been cut from the Master Plan, eliminating 600,000 cubic meters of building volume, while the cultural, educational, medical and training functions have been expanded. The plan calls for 79 hectares of green area and the planting of 100,000 trees and shrubs.

Meanwhile, amidst the negative reactions of those who have opposed using public money for the sports complex project, Luana Zanella, the leader of the Alleanza Verdi e Sinistra in the Camera presented a complaint to the Corte dei Conti, asking them “to evaluate the legitimacy, and possible violation of the laws concerning the management of public resources, of Decree July 3, 2023 of the Ministry of the Interior which allocates 93,581,321,26 Euro to Venice for realization of the stadium project”. Zanella has focused on the financing through the Integrated Urban Place, pointing out that “like the PNRR, they allow interventions with the objective of transforming vulnerable territories into smart and sustainable cities, limiting buildable soil consumption”. But the land of Tessera, she continues, is “an agricultural area near the airport (…) not the least degraded”. The Verdi emphasize that the same criteria that led to the blocking of the project for the PNRR also apply to the Integrated Plans.

Taking a different approach, City Councilor Giovanni Andrea Martini has written a letter directly to Prime Minister Meloni, complete with pictures of the green fields of Tessera’s farmland. Martini also points out that the government funding is meant to finance “exclusively urban regeneration interventions, as well as an important green hub that will also be usable by the municipalities of the neighboring areas”.

“The area in which the arena and stadium are to be built is not degraded, but rather today a flourishing agricultural area, and … furthermore it’s a part of the city with one of the highest per capita incomes in the area, with a very low crime rate.” “As is well known, in fact, in the Municipality of Venice there is an emergency of decay happening, but this concerns Mestre, which has now been branded the heroin capital of the Northeast, and not the agricultural and residential areas in the North of the city.”

Martini goes on to invite PM Meloni to come see Tessera with her own eyes.

-Source: La Nuova di Venezia e Mestre/G.A. Martini