Il Sirente-Velino Regional Park it will never be the same again. Last Tuesday the regional council of the Abruzzo Region approved by majority a bill presented by the center-right junta which provides for the reduction of the perimeter of the park to meet the requests of some municipal administrations who had asked to leave the protected area. A cut of over 10 thousand hectares denounce the environmental associations, alone 6.500 replies the regional councilor of the Abruzzo Region with responsibility for the Parks and vice-president of the Giunta, Emanuele Imprudente (Alloy), author of the law that has now become a national case.
"Abruzzo has been poorer since yesterday" reads a note released by 12 associations, including the WWF, in which the junta is criticized for having taken a decision “not supported by any scientific evidence or ecological study or even just economic ". "To satisfy the list of requests from some mayors of the area, motivated only by municipal interests and contrasting with the survival of protected species such as chamois, bear, wolf, eagle and many others, this serious blow has been inflicted on the Abruzzo nature which is remembered to be everyone's heritage. The reasons for the cut were based solely on dated requests from some Local societies, but the protected area in question is a regional park that has been established and bounded by the entire Region and which has been financed with regional - and not municipal - public funds since its inception ”.
What does the law provide and why the perimeter of the park has been reduced. To avoid the cut, the environmentalist acronyms were also activated with one petition signed by over 124 thousand people and promoted by important exponents of culture. Nothing to do. In the end, there was a cut. Among the controversies. Despite the controversy. But why did the center-right want to reduce the perimeter of the only park managed by the Region? The law explains that the re-perimeter had become necessary "following the changed socio-economic situations of the territory, the emergence of damage from wildlife (especially wild boar) that generated situations of conflict and significant problems for agricultural entrepreneurs and the difficulties connected with the post-earthquake reconstruction that finds procedural slowdowns linked to the presence of inhabited centers within the perimeter of the park ".
So much so that in the past some mayors of the area, certainly not all of them, had asked not to be included in the park anymore, complaining about the lack of investments, "the weight of the constraints, with the limits imposed on building activity and those deriving from simple belonging to a protected area, with the excessive proliferation of wildlife which, with particular reference to the presence of wild boars, constitutes a serious danger to people and their safety, also causing numerous economic damage to farmers ". In short, for some mayors in the area the park would have turned into a brake on development. And the same imprudent, defending the law in the regional council, he invited the opposition councilors "to take a tour of the municipalities falling within the territory and understand what it means to live in the park in those conditions ... this park has never worked, it is a park that has always remained in limbo".
Giorgio Fedeli of the M5S instead spoke of one ideological decision which winks at "those who want to deforest and those who want to hunt without too many limits", while the director PD Pierpaolo Petrucci defined the law as "retrograde and anti-historical when moving towards the ecological transition", pointing out the fact that many municipalities instead they wanted to stay inside the park. The imprudent councilor rejected all criticisms to the sender. The cut is about 6.500 hectares of "territory that does not have an environmental value of particular value", but above all the regional law with which the boundaries of the Sirente-Velino Regional Park have been redefined is the tool with which "you will soon leave the commissioner that has lasted for seven years" and a norm that has as its premise “protection and conservation are founding values on which we cannot go backwards”.
The League then defended the creation of the Technical Scientific Advisory Committee of which they will be part all stakeholders and which aims to create “a functioning management model that can make this regional park grow. The Park Guards were set up for the first time - underlined -; the auditors increased from one to three and the members of the Board of Directors from 11 to 7 with the salary that will be the attendance fee". The president of the Marsilio Region did not send them to say: “I am not going against the citizens who live in the mountains. Because the presumption of some radical chic bourgeois living in the Parioli salons to tell those who live on the Velino how they should live, if they can build a fence or whether he has to graze land or not, I reject it. After too many years of blockade in which, due to prejudice, these municipalities and citizens who asked for a different perimeter were not answered, we did it. This is the attitude with which we faced the Velino-Sirente situation: collaboration and respect for local populations". On the one hand, the center-right, on the other Pd, 5 Stelle and environmental associations that contest the law and shout scandal accusing the junta of having drastically reduced the perimeter of the park to give the green light to hunting and deforestation (Today.it).