Confederation of Tuscan Hunters on the new regional financial law and the regulations on hunting, "lights and too many shadows".
Financial and law on hunting: too many lights and shadows in the measures approved by the council of the Tuscany Region. The bills for the reorganization of governance in wildlife and hunting that had landed in the classroom of the Council of the Tuscany Region, for examination and voting in the sessions of 22 and 23 December, constituted a package of considerable innovative scope to improve the '' wildlife and land management activities, rationalizing the organization and optimizing the use of resources.
Reduction of the regional concession fee and simultaneous increase in registration fees for ATCs, to ensure certainty and quantity of resources and immediacy and certainty of the return to the territory of the money paid by hunters, as required by law to ensure management, environmental improvements, damage prevention and compensation, biodiversity protection and restoration interventions; reduction of the number of ATCs from the current 19 to 9 (one per Province and one between Florence and Prato), maintaining the current sub-division as sub-areas for the purposes of access for hunters, to reduce and rationalize costs and pursue greater homogeneity and effectiveness; establishment of the assembly of ATC delegates and strengthening of the functions of the board of auditors, of which the President appointed by the Regional Council, to extend participation and ensure maximum transparency; qualification of the competences of the Regional Observatory, to provide planning and management with all the useful elements of technical-scientific knowledge; strengthening of the role of the Council, to increase the contribution to the choices of the social components: these, together with the elimination of the prohibition of selection hunting for ungulates on snow-covered ground in compliance with the new national standard, some of the main elements of novelty - contained in partly in the 2015 budget and partly in the specific amendment provision of Regional Law 3/94 - the result of the work of Councilor Salvadori and of the Giunta, matured and refined in comparison with the regional consultation tables with the contribution of the most representative social subjects, enriched in passages in the Commissions of the past weeks.
A logical and complete reform plan, which while entrusting direct responsibilities and resources to the new Committees of the Territorial Hunting Areas - ATC identified as non-profit association structures - built adequate guarantee and control mechanisms, by the aforementioned Assembly and Board of Auditors the obligation to transmit once a year to the competent regional structure all the documentation necessary to allow the verification of the activity. Here the lights that had illuminated the premises end and the shadows advance which unfortunately obscure the conclusion.
The amendments presented last, and finally approved by the Regional Council, introduce provisions in stark contrast to the spirit and substance of the original bill, which valued and made responsible the function of the managing bodies of the ATCs and of the social representatives that compose them - hunters , farmers, environmentalists - while the voted text is evidently dictated by a prejudicial distrust towards them: the invention of yet another "Regional Commission for the control of the activities of the Atc", the obsessive specification of the procedures can have no other explanation to be followed for tenders and the acquisition of supplies and services, even the claim that the ATCs make use of the staff of the Provinces for the performance of their activities, regardless of the type of professionalism and skills that ATCs serve or the legitimate expectations of public employees who , perhaps, they did not think they had to find themselves dependent teeth of a "non-profit association".
Beyond any legal assessment of the consistency between these provisions and the clarifications that in the same text insist on the legal nature of ATCs (Associations? So private subjects? Obliged to make use of public employees? Rigidly subject to the Community rules on public procurement ? Even for amounts below the threshold? With the obligation to divide the contracts by functional lots?) That we leave to the legal experts - among them the legal services of the Council and the Executive, usually laudably attentive to aspects that, like these, the more detailed they appear - the political message seems clear: the regional legislator distrusts the subjects (the ATCs and therefore those who make up their bodies) to whom, however, it entrusts "tasks of publicistic relevance", and therefore has special and preventive surveillance.
A message of considerable gravity, which risks compromising the commitment and willingness to collaborate in the bud and discouraging the assumption of responsibility, as well as constituting a concrete obstacle to the timely operation of the management bodies. So close to the end of the legislature and in the presence of the tight deadlines set by the rules just approved, this set of questions cannot remain without clarifications and answers: by the Council and by the Executive, whose acts are entrusted with the implementation of most of the provisions of the law.
Confederation of Tuscan Hunters
(Federcaccia - Arcicaccia - ANUU)
(December 31, 2014)