Brussels, 24/02/2006 (Agence Europe) - The European Parliament's transport committee has selected six priority projects from the thirty designed to develop the trans-European transport network. By a large majority, the committee considered it impossible, because of budget cuts sought by the December 2005 European Council, to undertake the thirty projects. A budget of 6.7 billion euro was set by the Council, compared with the 20 billion euro originally proposed by the Commission, said committee chairman Paolo Costa (ALDE, Italy) in a letter to budgets committee chairman Janusz Lewandowski (EPP-ED, Poland) on 15 February. The “priorities from among the priorities” selected by the committee are those projects for which the European Commission had designated coordinators to facilitate implementation: priority project no 1 - the Berlin-Verona/Milan-Bologna-Naples-Messina-Palermo rail link, which includes the Brenner Tunnel; priority project no 3 - the high-speed South-West Europe rail link between Lisbon and Tours; priority project no6 - the Lyon-Trieste-Divaca/Koper-Divace-Ljubljana-Budapest-Ukrainian border rail link which includes the stretch between Lyon and Turin; priority project no 17 - the Paris-Strasbourg-Stuttgart-Vienna-Bratislava rail link; priority project no 27 - the rail link between Warsaw-Kaunas-Riga-Tallinn-Helsinki, called the “Rail Baltica”. The sixth project is to improve management and rail signalling as part of the European Rail Traffic Management System (ERTMS) on the stretch between Genoa and Rotterdam (priority project no 24). The committee says that around 8 billion euro of Community funding will be required for the cross-border sections of the six “priorities from among the priorities. It considers that an additional 4 billion euro will be required to overtake at least the cross-border sections of the 24 other priority projects. It added that if the share of Community funding granted to the TEN-T was reduced, the share to borne by the Member States would have to increase, if Member States really wanted to develop the TEN-T as they were committed to do.