The Councillors Who Answer Everything Except The Question

There are two kinds of letters you can send to the Local Councillors of Valletta.

The first kind gets an answer. A streetlight out. A blocked drain, a broken bench, a lift that stopped working. You report it, and sooner or later one of them replies. The machinery turns. This is the council as a customer care office, and on its good days it works.

The second kind of letter is different. Where are the permits? Who issued the permits? Why is that pavement gone? When will you join the residents on Evans Building, on Tables and Chairs, on the Revocation of the Noise Legal Notice, after the residents elected you? Those letters go out too, year after year. The answer is silence.

Four years of correspondence tell one clear story.

The invitation none of them answered, or even attended

On 14 September 2024, all seven elected members were invited, in writing and regardless of political affiliation, to join residents marching on Merchant Street. The list of demands was simple: pavements that elderly people and wheelchair users can actually walk on, streets an ambulance can pass through, parking freed from furniture, from the excessive amounts of outdoor catering, permits published on the facade of every establishment, enforcement that works. No mayor or councillor replied. None even showed up.

The petitions nobody else created, presented, or shared

The petitions filed in the name of the Valletta community - Evans Building, relief from noise, the national question of amplified music in public spaces - all came from us, the residents’ party. Representatives of both parties were asked, repeatedly and in writing, to endorse them publicly. Nobody ever did. No mayor, no councillor, no deputy, no party organ ever presented a single petition on any of these things… they never even signed them, never even shared them - they kept them as far in the dark as possible from the rest of the locality.

The votes that never happened

In four years, we objected to more than 130 speculative planning applications in Valletta. Moviment Graffitti objected. Flimkien għal Ambjent Aħjar objected. Din l-Art Ħelwa objected. …The Local Council, which holds a legal voice in planning matters, never used it once against an outdoor catering application. Not one motion was ever tabled in the council chamber on tables and chairs, on noise, on heritage. Not one.

There was a single exception, and it proves the rule. In June 2022, after a campaign that started from us ourselves, a parliamentary motion was presented to revoke the legal notices that imposed amplified entertainment on residential Valletta. It failed, and the legal notices stayed. In the chamber where all seven members actually sit, nothing has ever been tabled on anything.

The watchdogs they ignored

When the Ombudsman, a constitutional authority, ruled that pavements are public infrastructure and called for rigorous enforcement, the council said nothing. When the Commission for the Rights of Persons with Disability found four Valletta streets inaccessible to disabled residents, in breach of national law and the UN Convention, not one elected member of the council even replied. Can the State’s own watchdogs write to this council and receive the same silence residents receive?

What a council is for

Supposedly… it is the residents’ voice inside the system - the one body directed by the people who actually live in the locality. When it answers bins but not questions, it is a quarter of a council… where are the other three quarters? All the more so when there are seven elected members. Silent on the crucial things in our daily life as residents.

So we made, and are still trying to make, the other part ourselves. The petitions. The objections. The protests. The documentation. The record that now exists because people who were ignored kept writing. The lesson of four years of correspondence is not that the system is broken. It is that the system works exactly as it was built to work: for everyone except the people who live here. The council was always meant to be directed by residents. When the parties would not let it, residents had to become its opposition, its conscience and, in 2024, its alternative.

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