The Attard residents’ concerns on the Central Link project have been ignored from Day 1 until the present day as the government and Infrastructure Malta bulldozed through the project, a spokesperson for the Attard Residents Environmental Network (AREN) told The Malta Independent on Sunday.

Earlier this week, Infrastructure Minister Ian Borg announced that 90 per cent of the project is now completed, but this does not come as a consolation to the residents, given their opposition to a project that has changed the landscape of their locality.

The AREN spokesman said that the propaganda by IM that the Central Link was intended to reduce pollution and traffic in Attard is a blatant lie since, following the issuing of the permit for a Lidl supermarket in Zebbug, it is clear that the idea behind the project was a different one.

In the application for the Lidl outlet it says that the traffic from the supermarket will be mitigated by the Central Link, and this indicates that there was an agenda to promote Central Link for purposes other than the reduction of pollution, the spokesman said.

The government, on the other hand, has a different story to tell, with Minister Borg highlighting the benefits of the projects in a press conference a few days ago.

“The uplift that Infrastructure Malta is carrying out across the country… is being appreciated by most,” Borg said.

Addressing the press on Wednesday, he added that though “we are not perfect and can continue to improve”. He said that, unlike the Nationalist Party in opposition, the government “listens to people’s concerns” and that in “wanting IM to be removed and thus the Central Link to stop” the PN has been “making a mistake and burying their heads in the sand.”

The project has been at the centre of controversy ever since it was announced in 2018, with protests being held by environmentalists and residents, mostly to express concern that many trees which lined the roads in the area were to be removed.

In one protest, people tied themselves to the trees, holding placards and forming human chains to object to the project. Some 500 trees were uprooted to make way for the project, with Infrastructure Malta saying that others were planted in replacement.

But this has not placated the residents.

“At the moment the Attard residents are worse off than they were before because the bad planning and the way the project is being done is resulting in having all the traffic passing at very high speed from the service roads,” the AREN representative said. The residents of the area are being exposed to a higher risk of accidents.

“The way the project has been designed is not to facilitate traffic away from Attard but, on the contrary, it is an exercise of road widening and taking up agriculture land,” he said. “The Transport Ministry is simply not capable and competent to handle the projects they undertake”.

“We do not exclude that in the future that we will being this project up again and propose to a new government for it to be altered in such a way as to reduce its footprint as we have solutions and proposals to rehabilitate the agricultural land that has been taken up, and for which the farmers have not yet been compensated”.

The Central Link Project − having taken up some 49,000 square metres of mostly agricultural land − is a €55 million investment along the principal arterial road corridor in central Malta comprising of Mriehel, Birkirkara, Balzan, Attard and Ta’ Qali.