The Ordinary Court of Cagliari issued a first-instance ruling that condemns the Municipality of San Sperate to pay 5,440,000 euros to the owners of the expropriated lands for the construction of the Santa Suja multipurpose sports center. To this amount are added 64,424 euros of legal fees, as well as legal accessories and the costs of the technical consultancy.

A story that began in the 1980s when the Municipality, on the basis of a project localized by the Urban Planning Service of the Sardinia Region, proceeded with the expropriation of approximately 40,000 square meters of agricultural land with a further acquisition of another 10,000 in 1990. However, the TAR Sardinia annulled all the acts of the expropriation procedure, declaring the occupation illegitimate from the beginning. The dispute continued for decades, involving various levels of judgment, until the recent ruling. The Court established compensation on the basis of the market value of the agricultural land, taking into account the urban planning destination in force at the time of the transformation of the land. The ruling comes after the Court of Cassation, in 2018, had excluded that the value of the land could be determined based on an urban planning destination not yet in force at the time of the facts .

The municipal administration of San Sperate, needless to say, is not satisfied: «We do not agree with the conclusions of the Court, especially regarding the economic assessment of the damage and the considerations on our observations to the technical consultant. We believe the sums established are disproportionate and we reiterate that the appraisal does not represent an acceptable settlement proposal for us. We will appeal and evaluate possible conciliatory solutions only if based on realistic and sustainable criteria». The administration led by mayor Fabrizio Madeddu could therefore find itself paying the costs of a dispute that began when some of the administrators themselves were little more than newborns .

And while the administration is preparing for a new appeal, the Municipality chooses to remain positive in the face of such a burdensome sentence: "The amount to be paid is considerable. However, the body is virtuous and, even with sacrifice and renunciations (perhaps with the help of the Region), it can get out of it. It is also easy to understand what could have happened if this ruling had been, as the former owners of the land claimed, with the value to be calculated as a service area, or even worse, buildable. We will find ourselves faced with a debt probably three times higher with the risk of sending the municipal body into bankruptcy ."

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