Selected centers are where services that currently exist in ten smaller copies are concentrated, and along with services, powers are also transferred.
Who decides. The competencies that currently belong to individual municipalities pass to the executive of the Union, elected with the same proportional system already in use in cities. Each municipality maintains its own internal executive, proportionate to its inhabitants, with a budget for essential works and emergency response: no town is left without someone accountable for what happens in its territory.
What is concentrated. Urban police and law enforcement; proximity judicial offices; urban transport; schools; socio-health services; urban cleaning, waste disposal and purification plants; energy centers and renewable sources; urban planning. Today each of these things exists ten times and never fully.
Why it's the hard part. This step requires those who administer today to give up something, and this is the reason why plans like this usually stop here. But it's also the only point where savings are real: services are not cut, it stops paying for ten incomplete versions to have one that works.
On one point, time has already proven the plan right: the renewable energy communities, which Italian law has allowed to be established since 2021, are exactly the 'energy nucleus' of the area imagined here: a union of municipalities that produces and shares its own energy. In 2009, it was a proposal, today it is an existing tool.
A distinction that the 2009 plan did not make, and which is useful. Not all these entities are the same thing. Unions, ARO, Social Ambits, and GAL are an expression of the municipalities: they are born from the bottom up, and to them, competencies can be transferred. The ASL, on the other hand, manages territorial health on behalf of the Region: they already have the power by law, and the socio-health districts are an articulation of theirs, not an entity of the mayors.
The difference changes a request of the plan. Here above, the 'socio-health services' are listed among those to be brought to the Union: those are not a municipal competence, and asking for their transfer loses credibility in front of those who administer. The right word is not transfer, but coordination: a Union that organizes transport and decides where to concentrate services must sit with the ASL that decides where the clinics are, otherwise, a network is built that takes people where healthcare is not available.
And coordination is not a fallback: on the other side of the table, there are those who are doing the same thing. The 2022 decree on territorial assistance has redesigned proximity healthcare around the Community Houses: open presidiums every day, where the socio-health services of an area are in one place, with Community Hospitals, operational centers, and community nurses. Over thirteen hundred Community Houses are financed by the PNRR.
The model is hub and spoke: a main House, complete, and smaller branches in smaller centers. That is: it concentrates where it makes sense to concentrate, and stays close where it needs to be close. This is the design of this chapter, written thirteen years later, from another place, for another sector.
And there is the number. The main Community House is expected one every forty-thousand to fifty-thousand inhabitants. The 2009 plan indicated for the Unions twenty-five-thousand to forty-thousand. Neither of them copied the other: it's the size at which a serious service begins to be self-sustaining, and two independent reasoning processes arrived at it.
So the right request is not «give healthcare to the Union»: it's that the Union and the ASL design on the same map. If the Community House is born where public transport does not arrive, or if the network takes people where the facility is not, money is spent twice to solve nothing.
One service has already happened. Waste collection is a municipal responsibility, and Puglia has imposed on municipalities to organize it for Optimal Collection Areas: no longer each town with its own contract, but a single area service, with a single tender and a single interlocutor. It's the transfer that this chapter asks for, made by regional law, on a single matter.
And one area has gone further: the ARO 7 of the province of Lecce is equipping itself with its own public company instead of outsourcing to an external company. That is, the second half of what we wrote here: the service is not just done together, it stays in the territory, with its own means, employees, and profits that do not leave. Nobody called it «the 2009 plan», but the road is the same, and it shows that one competence at a time, it is already possible with the laws we have.
Original text from 2009, revised and expanded in August 2026.
How we wrote it before
This chapter has been rewritten. The earlier text is kept below: reading it shows how the idea changed, and when.
2009 The 2009 text
Testo originale del piano, scritto nel 2009. La stesura del 2026 ne conserva tutti i concetti e ne rivede la forma.
Definiti e realizzati i nuovi centri, bisogna preoccuparsi di generare aree che possano accorpare quei servizi che oggi si presentano in maniera frammentata nel territorio, e di conseguenza dispersivi. Ora verrà applicato il sistema politico ed elettorale già collaudato nelle città, quindi il sistema di elezioni a modello proporzionale. Così facendo riusciamo a ridurre ogni forma di spreco di denaro pubblico e privato. I poteri decisionali che oggi appartengono ai singoli comuni, dovranno essere trasferiti all’esecutivo dell’unione. In questo modo non si fa altro che cambiare la politica gestionale del territorio. Ogni comune verrà dotato di un esecutivo interno, in proporzione al numero di abitanti, per dare corso ad opere di prima necessità e di pronto intervento con dei budget predefiniti, adottando gli stessi principi di una città: nei corpi di polizia urbana, forze dell’ordine, pretura, trasporti urbani, istituti scolastici, servizi socio-sanitari, nettezza urbana, smaltimento rifiuti, depuratori di acque reflue, centrali energetiche e fonti di energia alternativa, pianificazione urbanistica del territorio, ecc.
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