In addition to funds from Italy’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan (Piano Nazionale di Ripresa e Resilienza, PNRR), the city can draw on funds from the EU’s post-pandemic fund and income to host the Catholic Jubilee Year in 2025. A further six billion euros could flow if Rome succeeded in outdoing the Saudi Arabian capital Riyadh and being awarded the contract for the 2030 World Expo.
“We are conducting the largest investment program in the last decade to modernize the city,” Mayor Gualtieri said in an interview with Bloomberg recently. The goal is “not only to make the city’s services more efficient, which has been somewhat neglected in recent years, but also to bring Rome to the forefront in terms of digitization, technological innovation and sustainability.”
Billion injection for ailing Metro
Several billion euros are to flow into the modernization of public transport in Rome. By 2033, the extension of the three subway lines and the revision of an old, previously unrealized project – the construction of a fourth line – should be completed. Gualtieri is very keen to work with Italy’s right-wing government, as the online newspaper Il Post recently wrote. Both in December and in early February, Transport Minister Matteo Salvini visited the Metro C construction site, accompanied by Gualtieri.
For the citizens of Rome, this is undoubtedly a positive prospect, but dissatisfaction still prevails at the moment: Due to lengthy and structurally essential renovation work, subway line A was closed at 9 p.m. for several months, line B is likely to remain so all year. The rest of the city’s transport network is too sparse to compensate for the failure.
Fight the garbage mountains
Further financing plans by Gualtieri include the installation of a modern 5G infrastructure for the entire city. He also wants to commission the redesign of parks and historical gardens and create virtual opportunities for tourists to explore Rome’s rich historical heritage. In the lowlands of politics, however, his biggest reform project is smoldering, which was also his most important campaign promise: to finally free the Italian capital from its mountains of rubbish.
The problem has existed for many years. Up until 2013, the almost 5,000 tons of waste that accumulated in Rome every day at that time were taken to the Malagrotta open landfill site just outside the city gates. Then Europe’s largest landfill had to close, it contradicted all EU standards and was completely overflowing. However, a new disposal concept was not available.
Since then, most of the garbage has been carted into four TMB (Trattamento meccanico-biologico; mechanical-biological processing) plants near Rome. Biological waste is sorted out there, and what is left is taken to waste incineration plants. The catch: Rome does not have a single such facility, the garbage has to be exported to various cities in Italy, and until five years ago some of it also ended up in Austria.
wild boars on the streets
When one of the TMB plants on the site of the former huge Malagrotta landfill burned down in June last year, the waste crisis flared up again. The rubbish returned to the streets, at least outside the center, and with it the wild boars, which have long since become a nuisance and are now allowed to be shot.
Before the garbage problem escalated again in the summer of 2022, Gualtieri promised to build a garbage incinerator for Rome to solve the problem once and for all. “It’s time to end this story, which has been going on for far too long,” said Gualtieri, who was also Italy’s finance minister for around a year and a half.
The project was controversial for a long time, the previous administration of the five-star politician Virginia Raggi refused to build it and received support from environmental organizations: the primary goal should instead be to increase the proportion of separate waste. The counter-argument is that the waste situation in Rome is so dramatic that its own waste incineration plant is the only possible solution.
Tab administration as a brake pad
Gualtieri’s far-reaching plans should not fail because of a lack of funds. Rather, another well-known evil of Rome threatens: the inability to appropriately spend the funds earmarked for the budget. The problem has several causes, but above all there is a lack of qualified civil servants, in other words: Many offices do their work poorly or slowly.
In his 2020 book “Roma come se”, the city’s former deputy mayor, Walter Tocci, describes the city administration as “close to collapse”. Tocci describes the result using Rome’s city finances from 2018: “545 million euros, about eleven Percent of revenue not used for current expenses This amount, fully available in the budget forecast, would have allowed the city to expand and improve its services.”
Should Gualtieri succeed, Il Post said, in getting the administrative apparatus to function and using the funds already approved or promised sensibly, there would be hope that the chronic dissatisfaction of the Romans with their city government would be reduced. The mayor himself is optimistic: the “constellation of the stars” indicates that a renewal of the city, which is considered ungovernable, will succeed.
