“Funded with funds that cannot be used for school building interventions and can no longer be used for flooded schools, for which all requests received have already been accepted”
With reference to today's statements by the President of the Emilia-Romagna Region Bonaccini and the Mayor of Ravenna, in reiterating what has already been clarified by the Ministry with the press release of 18 September 2023 regarding the resources used to provide financial coverage for the extraordinary interventions of the Southern Decree, it is necessary to reiterate that all the requests received from the schools affected by the flood were fully accepted.
It must then be added that the financial resources used to cover the Southern decree law are not classified as investment expenses and, therefore, do not have a multi-year nature and furthermore do not have and would not have had in any way the possibility of being kept in the balance sheet in the years following the current one. It follows that the resources in question did not have the accounting characteristics to finance school building interventions by local authorities. The budget allocations under discussion, which were instead attributable to current expenditure, could only be used for expenses to be incurred within a very short time frame, as promptly assured by the Ministry.
And in fact it is reiterated that these interventions, by express provision of the law, were admissible by the date of 31 August, as they were legally bound to the first emergency phase, in which the educational institutions were also able to act by making use of important procedural simplifications.
For the purposes of allocating the aforementioned Fund, the Ministry acquired the prior requirements from the interested educational institutions, which gave rise to an overall requirement framework of €10.174.736. It follows that, once the needs expressed by the schools affected by the flood have been fully satisfied and the deadline of 31 August has expired, the part of the fund not used within the scope of the aforementioned allocation, equal to 9.825.264 euros, would have constituted, where not otherwise used within the year, an economy that cannot otherwise be used and, therefore, destined to perish.
It is also reiterated that in order to ensure maximum timeliness of the interventions provided for by the decree-law, the Ministry of Education and Merit has initiated an exceptional and extraordinary procedure aimed at obtaining a cash advance from the Bank of Italy, which allowed, starting from 20 June 2023 (therefore before the conversion of the decree-law of 1 June 2023, n. 61 into the law of 31 July 2023, n. 100), to immediately receive the financial resources intended for them to ensure immediate and effective support.