Brussels, 07/11/2011 (Agence Europe) - The success of the infrastructure projects, advocated by the European Commission to revise the Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T), must be made in collaboration with the regions but should not be a drain on their finances. It will therefore be necessary to demonstrate both imagination and courage for raising sufficient funds to develop this central network that the Commission devised for the EU by 2020 and for which the roadmaps were unveiled on 19 October.
This observation was made by the Polish regions during a conference organised by the Committee of the Regions, which looked at the question of the role played by the TEN-T in the sustainable and smart development of the European regions. Matthias Ruete, Director General for mobility and transport at the European Commission (DG MOVE), asserted that “it is not Brussels that will be generating projects, no, only the TEN-T Agency will provide us with a more coherent framework. The public markets will be organised locally, even though they will be part of a central call for proposals process.”
Developing the regions at a local level. It is at a local level that everything is implemented and the regions therefore have a crucial role to play in developing the infrastructure projects. This is the point of view of Bernard Soulage, CoR rapporteur on TEN-T, and it is shared by Mathieu Grosch MEP (EPP, Belgium): “If the local authorities and regions are not used as mediators in these major infrastructure projects, the NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) phenomenon will always exist. So local authorities have to be involved if these projects are to succeed.”
There is no question of opposing regional policy and transport policy either. Grosch particularly emphasised the fact that complementarity and coherence between the strategies was required, without which structural funds would finance transport to the disadvantage of cohesion, or totally miss the TEN-T objectives. He also pointed out that they needed to avoid committing the mistakes of the past, where each MEP only acted on behalf of his own region in a perspective that was completely against a trans-European network, and still less in cross-border projects.
Clever funding. Tempers were strained somewhat when the subject of funding was raised. Bernard Soulage, Vice-President in charge of Europe and international regions for the Rhône-Alpes region (France) and Thomas Barrett, Director of the European Investment Bank, did not hesitate in calling for greater transparency and explained that the ambitious budget being called for in the transport field would be revised downwards in the multiannual framework. Barrett said that this now meant that they needed to be clever in their transport policies and financial mechanisms for developing these projects. He is convinced that the leverage effect expected from the project bond system is the right way to go in order to raise new sources of funding.
Finally, the CoR representative explained that Eurovignette 3, the taxing of heavy-duty goods vehicles, had been a missed opportunity for the Union to fund transport as a whole, with a clear preference for rail, which appears to him to be the best option for sustainable transport. This point of view was shared by Johanes Ludewig, Executive Director for the Community of European Railways (CER). He was quick to recall the Swiss example of financing the railways through a road tax. (MD/transl.fl)