Brussels, 15/04/2015 (Agence Europe) - On Wednesday 15 April, the Committee of the Regions (CoR) held a major conference on the Juncker investment plan and its impact on the regions. The question of how the regions and the European local authorities could take advantage of this plan was discussed at length.
Several representatives of the European regions expressed concerns that they are not in a position to propose local projects of sufficient scale to be directly supported by the plan. Following the crisis, “it is not possible to have massive investments by the local and regional authorities”, insisted Raffaele Cattaneo, an Italian EPP member of the CoR who was particularly on the offensive.
Miguel Gil-Tertre, a member of the cabinet of Commissioner Jyrki Katainen (Investment), took pains to reassure the members of the CoR, stating that “the regions will be able to submit projects directly, they don't have to go through their states”. However, he recognised that projects of more than €25 million will be financed directly, which will not be the case for those under that amount, which will have to go through financial intermediaries. As an alternative, he proposed that the regions go through regional sub- platforms, which could be set in place in the framework of the plan - but few details have been provided about these sub-platforms as yet.
Wilhelm Molterer of the European Investment Bank urged the local authorities to put projects together collectively, to increase their interest: “there is an excellent project in Italy, which brings together 23 local regions to set a water treatment system in place. None of them could have done it alone, but the 23 of them together have managed it”, he explained. For the European Commission, Rudolf Niessler stressed that DG Regio stands ready to assist the regions calling for help: “we already work with the regions a lot, there's nothing new in that. We will be there to help to build projects which may be of interest to the private sector”.
Finally, Luiz de Mello, of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, said that coordinating investment was always a challenge in a context of multi-level governance. He stated that his organisation had published a series of twelve recommendations on this issue in March of this year, and that it was currently putting together a “toolbox”, which will take the form of the scoreboard, to set these principles in place. (Jean Comte)