The Malta Environment and Planning Authority’s explanation on new bills for development application printing costs simply fails to add up.

Without a better explanation, which had not been forthcoming at the time of writing, it is unfathomable that an ‘administrative mistake’ saw thousands of bills being issued to applicants charging them for printing costs associated with their development applications – unless someone had been told specifically to levy those charges.

Besides that, we are not talking about small change here either. 3,500 people are reported to have received printing bills amounting to between €125 and €450 each. In other words, MEPA committed an administrative error amounting to between roughly half a million and a million and a half euros.

Nor could the mistake have been put down to some kind of misinterpretation of the new billing structures, which have been in place for quite some time now. Something in this whole affair smells of a cash raising exercise, with the authority forecast to remain €8 million to €12 million in the red this year.

At any rate, the notice has been retracted and those who had already paid the bills are to be refunded.

But while explanations over this debacle are awaited, this incident should not detract from the merit of the exercise at hand, that of introducing higher, more realistic development application fees.

The reason is that the taxpayer should absolutely not be made to foot the bill for development applications of either a residential or, even more so, a commercial development, and as such the introduction of new fees at the authority was, and still is, the right move.

The authority was being financed by the central government to the tune of approximately €9 million per year, public funding for what is now meant to have become a financially independent authority. But, according to financial forecasts for the authority being mentioned, it could have sunk even deeper into the red this year than in previous years. The Opposition yesterday insisted on an explanation and the public fully deserves one after the acrimony that had been caused by the introduction of the new fees levied by the authority.

That the fees at MEPA, with or without a drive for the authority to become self-sufficient, were due for an upward revision is undeniable. There are, in fact, other areas of government operations that could and should be given similar attention.

The fees the authority applies to development permit applications had not been changed since the Planning Authority, Mepa’s predecessor, was set up in 1993 – 18 years ago. No one could rightly argue that the rates should not change to at least reflect inflation, let alone the new economic realities that have emerged in the meantime.

The situation has clearly become unrealistic and has amounted to one in which the public, through its taxes, is effectively subsidising the cost of development - developments that have, in so many cases and in the eyes of so many taxpayers, resulted in further ruin for the country and the engulfing of much of its green areas by concrete over the last two decades.

The new rates are also proportionate to the size and nature of the development – rates per square metre for commercial developments are higher than those for villas, bungalows and penthouses while, for example, the rate for apartments are even lower.

A proper explanation is pending over this so-called ‘administrative error’ underscored by the Opposition, and which the authority seemed to scramble yesterday to set right. The Opposition may have been wrong to have protested the levying of the fees as it had done when they were announced, but it was quite correct to have highlighted those new and unfounded fees the Authority, through an administrative error or otherwise, had sought to charge.