Evaluating the planning gain in the practices of local authorities [La misura dell’accordo. la valutazione delle contribuzioni straordinarie tra norme di legge e prassi degli enti locali]

Abstract

The public/private partnerships have been a successful innovation in the implementation of urban plans and they became an ordinary instrument in city planning and management. In the partnerships, agreements on zoning allow more advantageous planning rules. The corresponding economic gain is shared between the administration and the property. Research has devoted attention to the nature of the economic gain, investigating its nature and how it should be shared. Less effort has been devoted instead to understand how general norms have found application in the administrative action of public authorities. The research focuses on these aspects and investigates methodologies and techniques with which public administrations have evaluated public/private partnerships in cities development projects. The study identified Veneto Region as a privileged area of research. We examined the administrative acts approved by the municipalities with regard to the public/private partnerships allowed by Veneto planning law (LR 11/2004) and by decree 380/2001 derogatory building permits. Attention was paid to provincial capitals and, in order to have a representative sample of smaller towns, the survey considered all the municipalities of the Vicenza province. Conclusions of the research are controversial. The economic issue seems well managed: local administrations acquired the economic ratio of the agreements and the necessity of sharing the gain resulting from administrative decisions between public authorities and landlords. Local acts focus on valuation methodologies, in particular on automatic or quasi-automatic valuations, with debatable outcomes: the application of automatic procedures does not necessarily lead to quality results. Lastly, in territories substantially homogeneous, only a few kilometers away, levy rates can be very different, posing obvious and relevant problems of effectiveness and fairness.