‘Slippage’ and dead cemetery plans

Why would a project to extend the Addolorata Cemetery need to be shelved? It’s definitely not because of the dead. KURT SANSONE reports

We have it from Social Policy Minister John Dalli’s mouth: the 2,500 new graves promised to the people prior to the election will not be delivered, because the project has been shelved.
It took one irate prospective grave buyer, who kept on enquiring about his decade-old application, to discover that the Addolorata cemetery extension plans were as good as dead.
According to The Sunday Times, replying to the man’s threat to go to the media, Minister Dalli rebutted by informing the man that government has “decided to stop the planned extension to the Addolorata cemetery to be able to develop a plan that does justice to this architectural jewel.”
If only this was the first government project to face sudden death after the election, we could be tempted to believe that Dalli has had a change of heart about the architectural quality of the planned extension and wants more time to develop an extension that makes for a graceful continuation of “this architectural jewel.”
It would be quite a late-in-the-day change of heart, since MEPA approved the extension measuring approximately 20,000 square metres in July 2006.
“The extension will be over an area which has hitherto been used as a dumpsite for building rubble. In this way, a derelict site has now been rehabilitated. The site will be landscaped to render it more harmonious both with the use of the site and with the surrounding countryside,” the MEPA statement approving the application said.
But the abandoned cemetery extension is not about a change of heart. It is just another example of the malaise public finances are in.
With Finance Minister Tonio Fenech last week admitting to a “slippage” in public finances, it is more than clear that some government programmes and schemes launched in the last budget have had to face the axe because public coffers, post-election, are not deep enough to fund them.
Fenech admitted that collective agreements signed with doctors and nurses after last year’s budget have increased expenditure beyond what was initially planned.
And with revenue not expected to be as generous as prospected, it is more than evident that ministries have been asked to trim expenditure for the rest of the year in a bid to keep the deficit in check.
The botched cemetery plans meet the same fate of the equity-sharing scheme offered by the Housing Authority for first-time buyers, the rebate on energy-saving appliances and the pharmacy of your choice scheme.
The latter three schemes were also stopped soon after the election. The problem?
No money.

ksansone@mediatoday.com.mt

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