Momentum backs Marsaxlokk Local Council’s stand for open spaces and real consultation

Momentum supports Marsaxlokk’s Local Council, which has been forced into the position of publicly opposing two proposals contained in the manifesto of the party that holds its majority. We applaud the Local Council for its pro-resident stand.

When a Labour-led Council has to write to the press to defend its own residents from a Labour manifesto, the question is no longer about colour. It is about who actually counts when decisions are made in this country. The answer, once again, is not the people who live there.

The first proposal concerns a plot of land in a residential area for which the Local Council already holds a Planning Authority permit to develop a public garden and a jogging track. Labour’s manifesto instead earmarks the same site for a multi-storey centre, including a fish hatchery and research facilities. The Council has opposed the proposal on the grounds that the site should remain open green public space. The Council has also demanded immediate clarification on Labour’s pledges concerning the regeneration of the Marsa industrial zone, and on whether the operations currently in Marsa will be quietly pushed onto Marsaxlokk’s coastline. They are right in not accepting decisions that damage their bays or reduce the quality of life of their residents. Momentum agrees, fully, because no community should be treated as the overflow for problems the State has refused to plan for.

What Marsaxlokk is living through this week is not new. The residents of Pembroke are fighting an entertainment campus on virgin public land that neither PL nor PN consulted them about either.

Momentum has been consistent on this throughout the campaign – public land belongs to the public. Local Councils know their communities better than any minister, and they must be given the autonomy, the resources and the legal weight to defend them. Communities must be consulted before plans are drafted, not after they are signed off. And no manifesto, from any party, should ever be the first time a village hears what is being planned for the land beneath its feet.

Momentum in Parliament will push for a constitutional amendment prohibiting the sale of public land for commercial use, for genuine Local Council autonomy in planning, and for meaningful community consultation as a legal requirement, not a courtesy granted once the contracts have already been signed.

“When a Labour-led Council in a Labour stronghold has to stand up against its own party’s manifesto, the message could not be clearer. Residents come last under the duopoly. They came last in Pembroke. And now they come last in Marsaxlokk, where land was quietly transferred in July, and revealed to the public only when the manifesto was published two weeks before polling day. Momentum’s answer is the same in every locality: residents first, public land protected, real consultation before any plan is signed. This is a Bidla ta’ Vera,” said Mark Philip Camilleri Gambin, candidate in the 3rd and 11th districts.

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