The accounts of the Municipality of Rome are a central theme of the electoral campaign and the subject of recriminations and accusations about past responsibilities. But what we want to escape from, because it concerns commitments for the future and not just the past, are the still unresolved structural problems which, if not tackled with determination, will continue to undermine the stability of the capital's budget. Politically very difficult problems.
Between 1993 and 1998, when, in the first Rutelli council, I had the responsibility of managing the finances of Rome (as well as the entire municipal system), starting from a situation of pre-instability, it was possible to restore balance to the current management , to finance investments without new debt but with income from privatizations (49% of ACEA, the Central Dairy which produced an annual deficit equal to half of its turnover, the disposal of buildings owned by the municipality). And a courageous transparency operation was carried out on what was and remains the bomb planted under the municipal budget: the deficit of the ATAC and Cotral transport companies.
Hidden deficits that were brought to light and that were covered by debt as the law (until the constitutional reform of 2001) required. An enormous figure, about 800 million a year which, thanks to the action of councilor Tocci, was more than halved in the following years. The debt of those years all comes from there, from transport. A particularly onerous system due to the large extension of the Roman territory, but also much more inefficient and with very low levels of productivity. In this regard, the result of the tender launched to integrate the public transport offer in view of the Jubilee was striking: the cost/km awarded was about a quarter of that of ATAC. The margins for cost reduction were therefore enormous provided that a stop was put to the system of direct assignment to Atac and Cotral with payment of costs at the foot of the list and the whole system was liberalised.
In the following years, once the privatization phase was over, debt was once again used to finance investments which increased an already substantial stock. With Alemanno, the creation of the bad company for the management of past debt cleaned up the current balance sheet, but to no avail. In fact, spending began to run wild again and in 2014 the declared structural deficit, even without the burdens of the previous debt, had risen again to 1,2 billion. The fiscal sacrifices asked of the Romans were therefore in vain.
This is because, even excluding the costs of criminal activities (which the judiciary will ascertain), the structural causes of Rome's financial imbalances remained intact: transport, as has been said, but also the waste system in which political resistance had prevented the location of the transformation and waste-to-energy plants by inertially extending the monopoly of the Malagrotta landfill, the closure of which is made up for today by sending Roman waste around Italy and Europe at almost unmentionable costs.
And again, the opaque relationship with the system of cooperatives supplying a very significant share of services (and current spending) in the area: from canteens to school transport, from grass mowing to personal services. Because if it is true that a complex metropolitan system such as the Roman one requires a strong enhancement of the role of the municipalities, it is however equally true that the central functions for defining standards, for carrying out transparent tender procedures (also for cooperatives which are enterprises in all respects), for the comparison and monitoring of costs and quality, for carrying out inspections and checks. A system already activated in the mid-90s with artisanal methods and which today, thanks to technology, would be very easy to implement, making all the data accessible and controllable even by citizens. In Rome, a true open government system would be revolutionary and highly dissuasive of opaque, patronage or illegal activities.
All of this was discussed in Parliament on the occasion of the approval of the SalvaRoma decree which, in fact, in the version of the Renzi government, incorporated many of the indications that emerged. And he did so despite the noisy opposition of some Roman deputies and councilors who later turned out, perhaps not by chance, to be compromised in the "middle world" system but also, inexplicably, by the Mayor Marino who would instead have had an exceptional opportunity to ally himself with the Government and with Parliament to reform the administration in depth. Therefore, it is possible to restore Rome: but clarity of the problems and political courage are needed.
