The planning authority started discussing the St Thomas Bay action plan, required by the 2006 South Malta Local Plan, after a court last March ordered it to decide on a request to sanction an illegal boathouse, a spokesman said yesterday.
“Discussions on the action plan for the rehabilitation of St Thomas Bay in Marsascala started after a court confirmed that the planning authority should take a decision on such boathouses within six months from the formal submission of the applicant,” the authority spokesman said.
These applications cannot be processed without an approved action plan for the area.
“The action plan will definitely take more than six months to complete and, as such, the planning authority will be informing the court accordingly,” the spokesman said.
The authority, which has 60 odd court cases pending against boathouse owners in the area, has started discussing the issue at board level, the chairman of the Malta Environment and Planning Authority, Austin Walker, told The Times yesterday.
He said it was still premature to say what measures would be listed in the approved action plan because the situation was “so fluid”, but plans to sanction the illegal boathouses were not on the board’s agenda.
Mr Walker was clarifying comments made a few days ago by an authority spokesman, reported on yesterday’s front page, about the illegal boathouses in St Thomas Bay. The spokesman had told The Times that, after the action plan is approved, owners would be able to regularise their position by applying for sanctioning.
“I can’t tell you what the action plan will include from now but it will come up with the proposals which best fit the requirements of St Thomas Bay,” the chairman said yesterday.
However, it was not the intention of the action plan that “whatever is on the ground will be approved or sanctioned”, he insisted.
It would not be possible to file an application to sanction a boathouse in St Thomas Bay without an action plan. But before being approved by the government, the terms of reference had to be issued for public consultation, reviewed and revised until the final document was drafted.
The action plan for St Thomas Bay, which has around 370 boathouses, is required by the South Malta Local Plan approved in 2006.
The local plan designated the St Thomas Bay area as “primarily for coastal recreation and related facilities (e.g. beachrooms)”. The action plan, it states, should provide guidelines to improve the area and existing boathouses, designate appropriate sites for common facilities, such as children’s play area and car park, and identify measures to improve the management of the area.
The fact that this policy “was around since 2006 and nothing effectively happened is not to my liking”, Mr Walker said. “The policy itself is very explicit: it needs to take into consideration what is on the ground, what facilities need to be taken care of and the improvements needed – discussions have already started in the board.”
He explained that the Action Plan for Dwejra in Gozo (with which the first spokesman had drawn a parallel) had clearly established the criteria for the sanctioning of boathouses in the area and the process behind it.
But although around 20 applications were approved in February 2008, the authority board turned down 13 requests to sanction in April 2010 and another eight in the past month.
After 2008, the authority board heard pending applications some of which, Mr Walker said, in theory “conformed with the Dwejra action plan but the board still decided that it would be better if these were not approved for the public interest”.
He admitted that comparing the decisions by a previous board taken in 2008 to the more recent ones, chaired by himself, “created controversy” but “that is life”.
The interpretation and application of policies varied over time and across different boards, he said, and one could not “put people in a strait jacket to put up with the policy... because otherwise the independence of who is deciding won’t be there”.