“It took place this morning, in the council chamber of our Municipality, the pre-arranged meeting with the members of the technical-scientific Committee of Regional Urban Planning, as part of the inspections launched in the Municipalities affected by the Strait Bridge project. The entire commission accompanied by the director of the Department of the Sicilian Region, the architect Calogero Beringheli, as well as the officials of the Civil Engineering and the Superintendence of Messina, saw a broad and qualified participation”. This is what we read in a note from the mayor of Villafranca Tirrena, Antonino Giuseppe Cavallaro.
“The technicians were received in the town hall by the Mayor Giuseppe Cavallaro, by the Deputy Mayor Gianfranco Ammendolia, by the councilor for Public Works, Gaetano Lamberto and by the head of the Technical Office, engineer Alfredo Russo. The Mayors, councilors and technicians were also present municipal offices of the neighboring municipalities of Saponara, Venetico, Valdina and Torregrotta. Mayor Cavallaro illustrated the tables and presented the observations transmitted both to the Ministry of the Environment and to the MIT, and subsequently to the regional Department of Urban Planning. With them, opposition was expressed to the creation of construction sites covering a surface area of approximately 80,000 m2 in an area located within the urban centre, a few tens of meters from schools and housing and production facilities. The visit, which concluded with an inspection of the same areas, made the Commission aware – continues the mayor – of the validity of the Administration's observations to protect public health, of the urbanized context, which would become impactful under the environmental, visual and landscape profile, as well as having a heavy impact on vehicular and maritime flows. The very fruitful meeting, extended to the Tyrrhenian area, also highlighted further critical issues from the road aspect of the entire section involved, from Villafranca to Valdina, for access to the quarries in which the deposit of the material will be carried out excavation. What emerged was the shared desire to ask the Stretto di Messina company to re-verify other sites, both storage and processing, outside the municipalities of Villafranca and Saponara. The institutional representatives of the communities involved have asked the technicians and managers of regional urban planning for adequate support in order to assert the reasons of the territories in the subsequent concertation phases, aimed not only at a different localization of the processing area, but also to the creation of a new road system serving the Bridge project, upstream from the state road, to reach the quarries. A solution, the one proposed, which – concludes the note – would solve the problem of the inadequacy of the now overloaded SS 113, which runs without a real alternative (especially for heavy vehicles) from Villafranca to Valdina”.