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The former president of the Calabria Region, Mario Oliverio, intervenes with a harsh stance against the proposal to reform regional public transport that has reached the Council. In the crosshairs is the planned suppression of the public body ARTCal to make room for the new joint-stock company AMCAL: a step which, according to Oliverio, overturns the mobility governance model in the absence of transparency, discussion and motivations of public interest.
Below is the full note:
“The proposal for the reform of local public transport presented in the Regional Council in recent days is unacceptable and disturbing. No tenders, zero discussion and governance in the dark. We are not faced with a technical modification. It is proposed to abolish ARTCal, a public body established by the 2015 regional law, to replace it with AMCAL, an entirely public joint-stock company. It is a choice that changes the governance model of regional mobility and which, for this very reason, should be accompanied by a broad, transparent and rigorous public debate. the territorial areas will be abolished (including the Cosenza-Rende-Castrolibero urban area area which has been operational for a few weeks) and everything, even the management of the regional railway lines, will be centralized to a private law entity about whose governance nothing is said.
The Regional Transport Plan, also updated with an act approved a few weeks ago by the Council itself, indicated the strengthening of ARTCal as the system’s control room. The proposal under consideration today instead follows a different path: it does not strengthen the Authority, it suppresses and replaces it.
The question is simple: why? Why this sudden and unmotivated reversal of direction?
What evaluations lead to this decision? What comparative analysis justifies the transition from a public law entity to a joint-stock company? What concrete benefits will this change produce for commuters, students, workers and businesses?
To date, these answers do not emerge at all, indeed confusion and lack of clarity is rampant.
Even more surprising is the moment chosen. A few months after the deadline of 31 December 2026, when the Region should concentrate all its energy on providing resources and data necessary for the preparation of tenders, albeit with culpable delay, and on overcoming the delays accumulated in the implementation of the Regional Transport Plan, a sudden new institutional construction site is instead opening up which risks absorbing time, energy and administrative attention. Furthermore, the circumstance appears very strange also because ARTCal itself, with the closure of the service contract with Trenitalia (2019), has allowed regional rail transport to take off in quantitative and qualitative terms, also due to the related investment plan in new trains and also allowing the Occhiuto administration to gain credit for merits that are not its own. This sudden change compared to what was stated in the aforementioned revision document of the Regional Transport Plan now escapes us. Replacing a public law entity with a joint-stock company without any explanation of the underlying public interest reasons also suggests possible elusive and instrumental purposes of uncertain legitimacy.
If the proposal really were to be approved with an accelerated process at the beginning of August, without an adequate investigation, without hearings and involvement of local authorities, trade unions, business associations, universities, commuters and consumers, a political problem would arise even before a technical one.
Then there is a question of method. A reform that redesigns the structure of regional public transport would have deserved to be undertaken directly by the Council, which should have openly claimed political responsibility for it. The choice of the council initiative is certainly legitimate on a regulatory level, but it makes a question inevitable: why was a reform of this magnitude not presented as an initiative of the executive?
Nonetheless, in representative democracy, the task of minorities is not to passively witness events as has been the case in Calabria for years, but to verify, contest, propose alternatives and demand transparency. This is why the total absence of a public debate on a reform that affects an essential service is once again surprising.
This is not about stoking controversy. It’s about demanding that a choice destined to impact the future of Calabrian mobility be discussed openly.
Calabria needs better transport, timely tenders, efficient services and credible institutions.
Public transport belongs to the Calabrians, not to the majority nor to the opposition. For this reason the Regional Council has the duty to stop, discuss, listen and motivate”.