Miriam Dalli said she will hold consultation meetings with both Floriana and Santa Venera communities on pledged large green projects in the coming months but she refused to be drawn to commit on timelines for either project.

During the election campaign, the Labour Party promised to convert five large urban spaces into parks and gardens, with plans to even redirect traffic to underground tunnels so as to make space for green areas in concentrated urban towns.

Two of those projects included the long-promised green roofing of the Santa Venera tunnels and transforming St Anne Street, in Floriana into a garden, with traffic rerouted underground.

The environment minister said that, like the San Ġwann and Cospicua greening projects, Project Green holds a number of consultation sessions with the local council and community before handing in the plans to the Planning Authority.

Last week, the minister said that design plans to transform San Ġwann’s main road into a green open space were submitted to the authority. In August, Dalli announced that a site that had previously been earmarked for development as part of the expansion of the American University of Malta in Cospicua will be turned into a public garden.

Without providing timelines, Dalli said the same process will be carried out for all of Project Green’s future projects.

“Studies that we have in hand will also be presented during such meetings, to make sure they go hand-in-hand with what the community wants,” Dalli told Times of Malta.

Pressed about when the meetings will take place, she said the process for other projects earmarked in the electoral manifesto will begin “in the months to come”.

The plans to roof over part of the Regional Road that divides Santa Venera was first announced in 2019 by then environment minister José Herrera. The proposed development would see the stretch of Regional Road before the Santa Venera tunnels roofed over and developed into a recreational green area with an additional 150 parking spaces.

In 2021, then environment minister Aaron Farrugia said geotechnical studies on the project were still ongoing.

Originally, it was planned for completion within three or four years, yet, there is still no indication of the project.

The Floriana project was first conceived in 2015 by four independent architects, attracting broad public support.

In February, lead architects said the time frames for Floriana’s garden city project were to be announced in the “coming weeks” and that the proposal was expanded to include a direct pedestrian path to Valletta.