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COMMON FORUM NEWS NR. 13
By Joop | August 9, 2006
Dear All,
Please may I have your attention for two important issues:
1] The next COMMON FORUM meeting
2] The draft discussion paper about the proposal for a EU Soil framework directive.
1] NEXT COMMON FORUM MEETING
As decided in our last meeting in Budapest our next meeting will be hosted by the Basque country, in Bilbao. The COMMON FORUM agenda committee agreed on having ” funding of contaminated land remediation and EU guidelines on State aid” as the main theme of the meeting. The format of the meeting will be the same as in Budapest, which means that the main theme will be introduced by some presentations. Subsequently, an in depth discussion will take place in smaller groups. I propose to have a single short general presentation on guidelines for state and a number of smaller presentations by country representatives about their national experiences. Based on the presentations we will set up an agenda for the group discussions, which may lead to some further developments like written COMMON FORUM statements, opinion papers, discussion papers or other actions that can serve our goal.
In view of the organisation of the main theme of the meeting ( if you agree with the general outline above) I have the following questions:
A) Volunteers for small “country” presentations on ” state aid problems and solutions”
B) Should we invite someone from the Commission to present the current ideas about application of state aid guidelines in contaminated land remediation funding ? Or can we provide the general information ourselves ( for instance by the secretariat)
The choice of dates for our meeting in Bilbao is narrowing down to 26 & 27 October or 2&3 November ( both are thursday and fridays). This leads to my third question:
C) Please let me know your preference - TILL AUGUST 31- if you did not do already.
2] DRAFT DISCUSSION PAPER ON SFD
In my mail dating July 6 I sent you a quite lengthy draft discussion paper with comments on the contamination chapter from a leaked draft proposal for a Soil Framework Directive. As you may know the acceptance of the proposal, which is still an internal document for the services of the commission, is being “blocked” by some of the commissioners . The controversy seems to be centered around the proposals EU wide obligations to deal with contaminated sites. In the COMMON FORUM meeting in Budapest we decided to make draft discussion paper on the contamination part of the proposed directive as far as we know it from leaked documents. We of course realized that we may not have access to the most recent version of the proposal but we expected that more recent versions would not be fundamentally different. An analysis of the possible positive and and negative consequences could still be useful for the following reasons:
- Future discussions about interpretation and implementation of the proposed Soil Directive
- To prepare national discussions with stakeholders which were in possession of leaked documents at an earlier stage.
- To share opinions about advantages and disadvantages of the obligations in the directive.
- To assess the way the directive structures the process of assessing the contaminated land problem and the choice of solutions, including public information and public consultation.
COMMON FORUM also hoped that a discussion paper based on the experience of it’s members how to design contaminated land policies could somehow play a role in the “deblocking” of the internal discussion between de commissions services. However the members of the soil team of DG -ENV made it very clear that this COMMON FORUM initiative could not contribute in any way to the discussion. They also were quite unhappy about the timing and with the -in their view- many misinterpretations of one of the many versions of the draft proposals. In view of this I propose not to continue with the drafting of the discussion paper till the official publication of a proposal by the commission. I thank those of you who reacted on the draft and in some cases provided additional comments. Concerning the future of the draft discussion paper I have 2 questions:
A) Do you agree to postpone further drafting activities
B) Please send me additional reactions on the draft, I need to know whether the paper is clear and how much support there is for my draft comments. General comments on the draft (negative or positive) are also useful, even if we decide to wait with further drafting till the publication of the commission proposals.
Recently thirteen countries (Belgium, Hungary, Germany, Slovakia, Estonia, Greece, Italy, Cyprus, Poland, Spain, Czech republic, Luxembourg and Portugal) have signed a letter to Commissioner Dimas to speed up the publication of the soil strategy proposals. I do hope that this will help to speed up the decision making in Brussels so that we can have a debate in public again.
Best regards,
Joop Vegter
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