Translated automatically by AI from the Italian original.
“Carta accuses me of premeditating the clash in the Sicilian Regional Assembly, but for weeks he had been announcing his intention to exclude Solarino and Floridia from the high environmental crisis risk areas. That was a precise political design. My reaction, on the other hand, was not premeditated. It was the consequence of trying to defend the territory I represent from what I consider a profound injustice.”
So said Tiziano Spada, a member of the Sicilian Regional Assembly for the Democratic Party and mayor of Solarino, commenting on the controversy following his clash in the Assembly with the parliamentarian Giuseppe Carta over funding for AERCA areas and the continued inclusion of the Municipalities of Solarino and Floridia within them.
Spada contests in particular the statements in which Carta called into question the continued inclusion of Solarino and Floridia in the AERCA areas.
“Carta asks me why I did not mention that he intended to refinance the AERCA areas in the next budget,” Spada said. “It is true, he told me that. But he forgets to add that subsequently, in the chamber, he argued that Solarino and Floridia should not be part of them. You cannot promise resources to a territory and at the same time question its right to benefit from them.”
On the exclusion of Floridia and Solarino from AERCA funding, Spada clarified: “Carta continues to argue that our Municipalities do not have the characteristics to belong to the AERCA areas, citing the failure to remediate landfills, planning and the use of funds. But he confuses the environmental classification of the territories with the allocation of resources. The AERCA areas arise from a national regulatory framework and the related founding measures. They were not invented by Carta and cannot be erased on the basis of personal political assessments.”
Spada also underlined the consequences of industrial pollution on the communities of the province of Syracuse.
“Not having a refinery within the municipal boundaries does not mean you do not suffer its effects. Solarino and Floridia, like Sortino and Carlentini, and all the other AERCA Municipalities, have lived for decades with the stench and the consequences of emissions from the industrial area. Air, water and soil pollution do not respect administrative boundaries. I find it unacceptable to argue that the territories of Solarino and Floridia do not deserve protection because they do not host major industries or because they supposedly have fewer cancer patients than other Municipalities.”
“Carta accused me of thinking about the dead without worrying about the living. I think about the dead, but also about the living who mourn them. Protecting health cannot become a competition between territories to determine who has suffered the most.”
Spada firmly rejects the accusations Carta levelled at him regarding his relations with the municipal councillors of Grande Sicilia in Solarino.
“The most serious part of Carta’s statements is the accusation that I blackmailed his municipal councillors, claiming that I demanded their vote in the regional elections, threatening to throw them out if they did not support me. A very serious accusation, which I categorically reject and which shows how far apart our ways of conceiving politics are. We are not the same. We have a profoundly different way of considering and treating the people around us.”
The member of the Assembly then returned to the statements about the next budget manoeuvre and the use of AERCA resources.
“Carta goes so far as to say he no longer trusts my work as mayor, that he must control it personally and that I would even be placed under special administration by the mayor of Floridia. I remind him that I answer to the citizens of Solarino, to the institutions and to the law, certainly not to him. I do not accept anyone dictating what political relations I should maintain.”
The parliamentarian also clarified the matter of funding for local events.
“Carta did not provide any contribution for the feast of San Paolo. The phone call he refers to concerned the feast of the carroccioli, for which the Municipality of Solarino took part in a public notice from the regional department for local authorities, obtaining funding through a procedure also used in previous years. The resources belong to the citizens, not to those who claim to decide which Municipalities should be funded and which should not.”
“Carta feels so powerful that he even contests the place from which I record my videos, echoing the words of the former mayor of Solarino, who said I spoke from the mayor of Floridia’s office. For four years I have had a political office in Floridia, where I regularly hold meetings. I would never presume to tell him where to organise his appointments, whether in Melilli or Sortino, as he usually does. It is a question of freedom and mutual respect.”
Spada returned finally to the clash in the Sicilian Regional Assembly and the accusations about the tone used.
“I have never denied that my reaction was heated and that my gestures and tone could have been different. After just one minute I went to the president of the Assembly to apologise for the manner of my intervention and, in front of him, I repeated the same considerations to Carta. I apologised for the manner, not for the reasons. Because defending your own territory is nothing to be ashamed of.”
“Carta invites me to reconsider my political attitudes. I invite him to reflect on his own way of exercising his institutional role. On his continual claims about who should receive funding, who should be excluded and who should do what. In the video he even goes so far as to say that this province, if it lives, owes it to him. I believe instead that this province lives thanks to the workers, the entrepreneurs, the families and the thousands of people who face enormous sacrifices every day. No one can think they own it.”
“He should simply have apologised to the citizens of Solarino and Floridia for calling into question their continued inclusion in the AERCA areas. Because the real reason for the clash was not the decision to allocate more resources to some Municipalities rather than others, but the intention to reconsider the environmental recognition of our territories, arguing that for 30 years they had undeservedly benefited from it.”
