‘Valletta is not a milking cow’, residents tell MPs

A group of Valletta residents has railed against the “systematic destruction” of their community in an open letter to MPs.

In the letter sent Friday, Valletta residents group Residenti Beltin said the capital had “been forced to lose its heart and soul”, while listing several grievances affecting residents of the city.

“You have turned a living community into a ‘milking cow' for short-term commercial gain, while the permanent society that keeps this city alive is treated as an inconvenience”, the group said.

It warned that unless action was taken, Valletta would become an “unliveable, inaccessible... hollow, commercial shell”.

The group, which stressed it was writing to MPs “not merely as residents, but as the last remaining custodians of a UNESCO World Heritage Site that is being systematically gutted”, listed several issues affecting the capital and other areas of the country.

Pointing to legal notice LN 161/2022 - covering business hours regulations – Residenti Beltin accused the government of “intentionally introducing legislation designed to be unenforceable”.

The group said there was a “music crisis”, with supposedly one-time events turned into “repetitive abuses” and authorities turning a blind eye to music extending beyond 1am – a curfew they said was already harming the health of citizens.

The residents also highlighted the government’s “refusal” to set decibel limits or noise-mapping technology while instead relying on the term “moderate levels” in the legal notice to judge noise levels, a situation they described as a “third-party method used to drive residents out of their own homes”.

They accused the government of being in breach of the Equal Opportunities (Persons with Disability) Act and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, describing the disability rights commission’s recently publicised monitoring of 25 public spaces that have become inaccessible due to tables and chairs as a “national shame”.

Residents said the “commercial saturation” of streets with chairs and tables leads to “physical gridlocks”, a situation that went against the government’s oath to protect the public but also created obstructions for emergency vehicles, adding that public space “no longer exists” in Valletta.

On heritage concerns, the group described Valletta’s famous World Heritage Site status as at risk: “By ignoring the need for a Buffer Zone and a resident-led Management Plan, you are risking the permanent de-listing of Valletta. You are trading a thousand years of history for a few years of catering revenue”.

It noted that the residential population of Valletta had collapsed from 6,000 to 4,000 – a reduction of a third – in 10 years.

Residenti Beltin called on MPs to empower public authorities such as the Planning Authority and local councils to confiscate illegal street furniture on the spot, remove ambiguities from the law and define strict decibel limits and “prioritise the citizen” by restoring balance to the capital.

“Valletta is more than a backdrop for tourism; it is the soul of Malta. If you continue to treat it as a milking cow, you will eventually find that the cow has been bled dry,” the group said.

“We demand that the state stop obstructing the work of our public entities and start upholding the rights of its citizens, following the duty to honour local and international obligations towards culture, heritage, residential and disability human rights.”