In the political and social debate that has been developing for months now around the recipes for getting out of the serious economic crisis that has hit our country, infrastructural interventions have assumed particular importance given the heavy cuts made in recent years and the infrastructural gap that separates the Italy by many partners, including European ones.
Often, however, the need and willingness to invest in public works collided with a general one ineffectiveness and inefficiency of the entire implementation process, from the planning phase to the management of the work.
On the one hand, the inability of many public administrations, which have not fully understood theimportance of planning and, too often, they continue to follow the logic of political opportunity far from the real needs of the territories.
In planning of public works, it is necessary to start from an assumption, so trivial as to become revolutionary: it must achieve what the country really needs.
Quality infrastructure, realized in the right times and low costs, energy efficient, to a known and contained management cost and recognized social value.
This means that the choice of which public work to carry out cannot depend exclusively on the availability or otherwise of a project that can immediately be started, which allows the work to start quickly, but requires a preliminary and careful cost-benefit analysis, who knows how to identify the real priorities, and systematic monitoring of the entire construction phase of the works.
In particular, public administrations should have the ability to define, within a project preliminary, the real needs of a territory and to evaluate the actual effectiveness of the proposed interventions.
The next moment is that of programming, which must be certain, transparent and projected into the medium-long term, otherwise there is a great risk of generating a cfile of substantial uncertainty in the financing and feasibility of the priority works.
From this point of view, the choice made by Minister Delrio to identify, within the ambit of strategic works, those that really have priority, to which guarantee an adequate flow of resources in order to ensure their feasibility, appears appreciable.
It seems necessary to provide a task force which favors the selection and evaluation of quality projects and enables the State to exercise the right and duty to monitor the effective and correct use of the public resources transferred, in order to propose any necessary changes to the financial profile of the investments and punish any inefficient behavior.
Based on the experience of this task force, it will be possible to imagine a management control that offers a guarantee of knowledge, transparency and good use of public resources.
An important opportunity to improve the process of creating public works is represented by implementation of the new EU directives on contracts and concessions.
The Delegated Law, currently under examination by Parliament, introduces corrective measures in the current legislation to improve the functioning of the market, many of which in line with what the ANCE hopes for.
In particular, regarding the designthe forecast should be noted of measures aimed at limiting the use of design changes during constructionwhile ensuring design quality and designer accountability in the event of design errors.
It is an appreciable and fully shareable principle, because the project is central to the realization of a well-made work, although it is necessary to guarantee effective application of the rules on the professional liability of designers and project verifiers.
As for the topic of “design and build” the delegation bill provides, in particular, a ban on awarding the integrated contract on a preliminary project, and a radical limitation on the definitive one.
The elimination of the integrated preliminary contract appears acceptable, as it is a particularly onerous method of assignment for companies.
The preference towards tenders based on an executive project, on the other hand, does not take into account the fact, demonstrated by experience, that projects are never really executive, in a context in which, moreover, there is no possibility of concretely activating the guarantees of the designer or of the validator.
A compromise solution it could be to leave full freedom to the administration to entrust the execution of the work, on the basis of a definitive project, to a company that will have to prepare the executive project.
It is a solution that would allow a “judicious coupling” – to quote Gadda – between the planning and executive phases which overcomes the clear separation that characterizes the current system, according to an integrated approach of the entire construction process.
Among other things, the ever-increasing diffusion towards integrated management systems based on BIM, "Building Information Modeling", impose the adoption of a more synergistic approach between all the construction phases based on interoperability between the various subjects involved .
Ance is ready to take on this challenge, in the awareness that only with a synergistic action between professionals, businesses and administrations is it possible to succeed in realizing this "revolution".
In this sense, once BIM has become fully operational, administrations could be allowed to opt for a tender in which the competitors are called to a dialogue, aimed at identifying the solutions for improvement of the final tender-based project, more suitable for satisfying the needs of the contracting authority.
Attachments: Speech President Ance Claudio De Albertis.pdf
