“Thank the majority, who allowed you for an hour to talk about who knows what, and to express your stomach aches.” The Federico Basile you don’t expect reveals himself at the end of the extraordinary city council session dedicated to the mayor’s start-of-term report. A report which – Basile himself, but also the president of the city council Massimiliano Minutoli, had clearly said – was not “obliged”, but which in fact was induced by the opposition, which demanded it, and was held thanks to the majority numbers in the chamber, hence the mayor’s poisonous underlining.
A mayor who, closing a session that he himself had opened with a flash intervention, did nothing to hide his intolerance towards a debate evidently considered superfluous and responded to the interventions of the opposition representatives (no one spoke from the majority benches) with a hard face. Leaving, however, some question marks that emerged from those same interventions.
The opposition
The debate was rather rapid, fifteen minutes for each speech, with some ideas which, in fact, had already emerged several times in this first part of the mandate. Libero Gioveni of Fratelli d’Italia, for example, focused on the organization of staff, but he was also the first to raise a theme that returned several times in subsequent interventions: the delays in the financial statement, the final balance sheet, which still doesn’t exist, complete with a reminder from the Region. «The responsibility is political – said Gioveni –, probably also due to the mayor’s early resignation». For Alessandro Russo of the Democratic Party «what we will do-we will say after 4-5 years is not up to the standard of the start of his second mandate, considering the continuity starting from the De Luca council. What will happen when this enormous availability of extra-budgetary funds ends?”, while her Democratic colleague Antonella Russo returned to the financial issues: “Since the rebalancing plan was approved by the Court of Auditors, we no longer talk about it, we can’t understand what is happening”. 24/7 water, ATM runs, sanitation and the issue of security (“three fights just the day before yesterday in Piazza Cairoli”) are the topics put on the agenda, however, by Cosimo Oteri of the League, while the position of the Genoese Benedetto Vaccarino is “wait and see”.
The hardest attacks came from those who had loudly asked for this session to be convened, then involving the rest of the minority, the Scurria Mayor group. The group leader Pippo Capurro, among other things, focused on the subsidiaries («governed by the logic of financial and political division»), on the villages and on the construction sites, «too many works that start and are not completed». Marcello Scurria indulged in a sort of “appendage” of the electoral campaign, at least in tone: «The Municipality has not yet brought the 2025 report to the chamber: give us a date, the real one, unless you are waiting for the TAR’s ruling, for the commissioner to deal with it. This is a report from those who produced the problems, not found them. Can you point us to just one real public work completed, other than the arrangement of a few small gardens? The balance sheet is a walking dead man, with residual assets and doubtful debts. And then the administrative decentralization: it was the first resolution in the Council, what happened to it?
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