There are 513.449 amendments to the constitutional reform text of equal bicameralism: this immense amount of proposed modifications led the secretary general of the Senate, Elisabetta Serafin, to rally all the officials of Palazzo Madama. So a task force was started for catalog all amendments by computer and arrive prepared at the end of the first week of September.
The novelty, which could change the current practice in Parliament, lies precisely in this process of digitization of over 500 amendments. A necessary procedure, given that the printing could cost almost a million euros, with a waste of ink and paper that would make even the most peaceful environmentalists fervent.
A single paper copy of the amendments should cost around 2.900 euros, according to what Corriere della Sera writes today. This is an expense necessary to print 100 volumes, each of 1.000 pages, for a total weight of 2,5 tons. According to Senate rules, one copy of the amendments should be printed for each senator. And here the cost would rise to almost one million euros.
Hence the idea of a necessary spending review on the expenditure for printing the amendments. For this we should opt for the electronic collection of the amendments while the few volumes that will be printed will be reserved for the commission chaired by Anna Finocchiaro.
