(gro) The garbage scandal as a southern Italian perennial: Things are a bit sloppier around Naples and also in Sicily. Really? No, if you like the streets in the deep south to be clean and tidy, you should go to Taormina. The picturesque Sicilian mountain town high above the strait to Calabria, with its decorative view of Mount Etna, is at least as clean in every season as Meersburg on Lake Constance in Germany. After all, people have known for almost 200 years what tourists from the cool north appreciate. In the megacity of Palermo, things are quite different. In the metropolis of Sicily, the tourist is a marginal by-product of the hard daily life. And the garbage collectors simply don’t care about the visitors. They want to be paid for their overtime and better protective clothing. And because that doesn’t work, there are strikes again and again. And because burning mountains of garbage around Naples made headlines around the world, the Palermitan garbage problem is now also receiving increased media attention. But Palermo is not Naples, and the Camorra is not the Cosa Nostra.
No interest in the garbage business.
The Cosa Nostra, the original form of the Mafia that grew up in Sicily, would be hell-bent on getting involved in the garbage business in Sicilian municipalities. It operates in other areas, preferring to help itself to billions in subsidies, to the lucrative financing opportunities of drug, arms and human trafficking, and to real estate deals that allow illegally earned money to be fed into the legal economy. The Camorra, far from being well-positioned in business terms, still sees an opportunity for lucrative business in and around Naples when it comes to garbage. The result was the ongoing garbage chaos when precisely this business, contracted out to private companies, could no longer be done undisturbed thanks to the persistence of the police and carabinieri. Rome’s much-maligned prime minister, Silvio Berlusconin, did the rest when he assigned the military to garbage disposal and had the construction of a garbage incinerator pushed through.
A classic local political problem.
In Palermo, unlike Naples, the garbage problem is homemade in a classic way: unlike Naples, garbage disposal is still a purely municipal task. The municipal waste disposal company AMIA (Azienda Municipalizzata Igiene Ambientale) emerged from the municipal waste disposal company founded in 1968, which after a transitional period was transformed into a private limited company in 2001. As is well known, one wants to be flexible.
Currently, the waste disposal company lacks 150 million.
The AMIA, which is dedicated to numerous environmentally relevant tasks (for example, also the insect and rat control) and recently also concerned about the repair of the roads and sidewalks, is missing, according to their own information at the moment about 150 million euros to the regular solvency. The company, whose sole shareholder is the city of Palermo, is endowed with a share capital of just under 54 million euros – far too little to finance necessary investments. After some spectacular garbage strikes in the fall of 2008 and in June 2009, the government in Rome transferred around 95 million to AMIA to help bridge bottlenecks that are now forming anew in the fall of 2009. But another much-needed infusion failed to materialize: The city council’s proposed increase in garbage fees by a whopping 35 percent was rejected by the city parliament with a clear majority. The main reason for the rejection was that the management of AMIA has authorized itself in part quite lavish business trips and, as it is further said from circles of the city administration, little interest shows costs effectively to control..
Waste-favorably live in the city center.
Sufferers of the conflict are the workers of the waste management company – and the citizens of Palermo. The former have been waiting for months to be paid for their overtime, while the latter are annoyed by the growing piles of garbage. Those who live conveniently in the city center – which in this case means near a city councilor, a high official or a prominent government office – are lucky. Some of the garbage workers in such “prominent” areas of the city work almost around the clock, although the garbage disposal of the central city area is actually limited to the time from 6 to 10 pm.