Gozo valley files denied as ‘too general’

The Ministry for Gozo rejected a Freedom of Information request about valley cleaning and rehabilitation works on the grounds that it was “too general”, drawing a public challenge from Momentum over whether the paperwork behind the works exists in full.

According to Newsbook, the request sought a fairly ordinary administrative trail: where the works took place and when, what technical and environmental assessments were carried out, what expert advice was taken, which machinery and methods were used, how waste was disposed of, and what inspection reports were produced. These are not decorative questions when 34,000 cubic metres of waste and debris have been removed from seven valleys. They are the file.

The ministry’s answer, as reported by Newsbook, was that the works were “formal and transparent”, carried out with Planning Authority and Environment and Resources Authority permits, and awarded through public tenders. That is a defence of process in broad outline. It is not the same thing as producing the documents that let the public inspect the process in detail.

On a small island, opacity often arrives dressed as administration. A request is too wide, too vague, too awkward to process. The form survives; the substance retreats. If Momentum’s request was unclear, the ministry could have asked for clarification or narrowed the scope with the applicant. Graziella Spiteri, the party’s spokesperson, made exactly that point. It matters because the refusal concerns works in valleys, not a filing cabinet of trivia. These are environmentally sensitive sites where the method can be as consequential as the intention.

That is why one detail from the same chain of events remains difficult to set aside. Newsbook reported that the Malta Ranger Unit filed a report with the Environment and Resources Authority over the use of heavy machinery in the Mġarr ix-Xini valley, and that photographs later examined by the publisher showed an excavator with a toothed bucket despite permit conditions allowing only “cleaning-type” toothless buckets. Momentum’s own photographs, Newsbook said, showed a toothless bucket in use, which leaves two possibilities the public cannot yet resolve from the available record: practices differed between sites, or they changed after the complaint.

Either way, the missing or inaccessible documentation becomes the story. Not because a refusal proves wrongdoing; it does not. But because the ministry is asking the public to accept reassurance where records would be better. Malta’s Freedom of Information Act is supposed to force a public-interest balance in exactly this kind of case. Works paid for with public funds, carried out in protected or sensitive environments, should not depend on ministerial narration after the excavators have left.

Momentum linked the refusal to another argument over unpublished expert reports at Ta’ Qali. That comparison is politically useful, but the sharper question is narrower and more practical. When government says a valley intervention was necessary, permitted and professionally overseen, what is the public entitled to see without having to fight for it?

For the ministry, this may look like an administrative dispute over wording. For anyone who has watched a valley floor altered by machinery, it is a dispute about whether the record exists in a form that can still answer simple questions after the video announcement and the debris count have done their work.