Local councils director stands firm on blocking bottle bye-law

By Miriam Dunn

The fact that the local councils department believes the Litter Act is sufficient for regulating the carrying of bottles and glasses in Paceville has made supporters of a tougher new bye-law question whether the authorities understand what is really needed to help the locality.

The department’s decision to veto the bye-law, on the grounds that it was unnecessary and wrongly-worded, infuriated its supporters, who include St Julian’s local council, the police, bar owners and the Tourism Minister, who believe that such a law would help in the fight against crime in Malta’s entertainment mecca. It is widely recognised that allowing large numbers of revellers to congregate in the roads of Paceville with bottles and glasses can be potentially dangerous, especially when trouble breaks out.

But local councils director Victor Rizzo yesterday stood firm about the local council department’s decision, stressing that the key was to ensure current legislation is enforced.

"By duplicating legislation which is not being enforced effectively, with other legislation that states absolutely the same thing I doubt we would achieve the answer to Paceville’s problems," he said. "The next step is due enforcement. The local council, through its local wardens, now has improved means to take that step."

But his words are unlikely to placate the people that believe tougher legislation is needed to deal with Paceville’s particular problems.

The bone of contention seems to be the fact that the local councils department believes the carrying and disposing of bottles is covered sufficiently at law by the Litter Act.

Mr Rizzo said that when the council had proposed to prohibit drinking from glass containers out of doors, the department’s legal advisors advised that the act of drinking from glass containers out of doors in and of itself did not and should not constitute a legal infringement.

"Clearly the council’s intention is not to ascribe a moral value to drinking from a glass bottle when exposed to the elements, but rather intends not to allow the littering of glass containers which can prove hazardous and unsightly," he said.

Mr Rizzo said that the Litter Act already prohibits littering and under its authority people are already disallowed at law from littering.

"This proposal had therefore to be objected to because the law does not allow councils to duplicate in their bye-laws what is already regulated elsewhere in legislation," he said.

But it is not only the littering aspect of bottles and glasses that is behind the bid to get the laws tightened in Paceville; bar owners, the police and even security experts have long argued that glasses and bottles are potentially dangerous weapons when trouble breaks out.

Now supporters of the law are concerned that the department for local councils, in its citing of the Litter Act, is missing the wood for the trees.

But Mr Rizzo yesterday stressed that St Julian's local council’s draft of its wide-ranging bye-law had been submitted under the heading ‘Cleanliness in Public Places’.

Some points, such as the regulation of advertisements of activities on street furniture by means of stickers and regulation of waste collection times, were not, in general, opposed by the local councils department.

Mr Rizzo said that St Julian’s local council might wish to proceed with the fine-tuning of those parts of its proposals that had been cleared by the department.

"However, the other points mentioned here are clearly issues of (perhaps justified) dissatisfaction of the council with the enforcement of already existing legislation," he said.