July 1999, Qawra, Malta.
The tomna-sular, A
devil-oper’s unit of measurement.Some days ago, I ducked out of the wicked afternoon heat for a cool drink at a local bar and came across this character, hereinafter referred to as Censu. Cool lagers taste all that better in the company of colourful characters. This guy was no exception. When casually asked about the nature of his business, Censu humbly looked down to ground beneath his feet and said
Inhammel, a very patronising way of declaring his involvement in big time excavation and earthmoving.It transpired that in an average day, Censu changes the contours and shape of this land more than all the rest of us put together in 10 lifetimes. Given half a chance, Censu and his competitors would alter the shape of this Island from that of a detestable (his words) fish to that of a nice juicy burger.
And as we ingested one cool pint after another, and not without the occasional slurring of words, Censu patiently initiated me into his 3D universe with a string of mathematical variables. These variables were the answer to a riddle that has hounded me in recent weeks, Maghtab. Why is Maghtab rising at such a fast rate? I see it visibly rising on a daily basis. So let us check out the facts.
Fact 1 - In Malta, the price of property has risen past the absurd, developers maximise their returns by first digging downwards as deep as possible and then build up towards the heavens as high as permissions and exasperated lobbying allow.
Fact 2 - Once unleashed upon a site, an average excavation gang will chomp away into Malta’s bosom at the incredible rate of one tomna-sular in less than 4 days. One tomna-sular measures 100ft long by 100ft wide by 11ft deep. That’s 110,000 cubic feet (3096 cubic metres) of earth removed from a surface area of circa 10,000 square feet (925 square metres).
Fact 3 - The excavation of one tomna-sular will result in a procession of some 300 twenty-five ton trucks, wrecking and littering our roads from the excavation site to Maghtab. At Maghtab, the Government of Malta, acting as our agent, will accept the handsome one-time fee of some 38 cents per ton to allow these trucks to dump their load in perpetuity. The cost of dumping one tomna-sular at Maghtab is less than Lm 3,000.
Let’s consider the implications.
Developer’s Gain
- Bearing in mind that annual commercial rents have escalated way past Lm40 per square metre, let us imagine that, upon completion of the project, our developer rents out the excavated tomna-sular for a paltry annual rent Lm10 per square metre. Then, from a whopping big hole of one tomna-sular the developer will receive a net annual rent of some Lm 9,000 per annum, which when capitalised at 5%, yields an increased property value of Lm 180,000. After graciously allowing 50% for construction costs, the developer ends up making a net gain of Lm 90,000 per tomna-sular excavated. Good luck to him!Our Loss
– On the other hand, let’s imagine that excavated earth was a storable commodity. For the purpose of removing the excavated earth away from the building site, the developer would logically need a massive 1 tumolo warehouse, eleven feet high. I shall venture a paltry annual rent for one such warehouse in a dingy area of Lm 3,000 per annum. Then, the capital value of this warehouse would be in the vicinity of Lm 60,000. Now consider: the cost of ‘storing’ one tomna-sular at Maghtab in perpetuity is less than a paltry Lm3000. Bad luck to us!Sir, we, the gullible natives of Malta, are being had. While national coffers loose countless tens of thousands of liri per tomna-sular dumped at Maghtab, we sit pretty watching the dumping site rise like the Tower of Babel and the environment waste away by the minute.
To add insult to injury, some might even dare blame the Maghtab problem on our domestic garbage!
Malcolm Caire