On the telephone today I asked Ranko Bon to provide a short update in regards to Jupiter Adria’s golf course resort proposal in the valley below Motovun. He did more than that – and wrote a full account of recent events there, including local press reaction, on his Residua Blog.

Last June we mentioned (here) a March decision by a commission setup jointly by the Minister of the Environment and the Minister of Culture to vet Jupiter Adria’s proposal. The commission requested that the number of beds in the accommodation around the course be halved (from 600 to 300).

Jupiter Adria refused to swallow this decision – and so the ‘behind-the-scenes’ pressure began.

Firstly, the Ministry of Culture was seemingly side-lined. Golf courses today don’t have the environmental impact they once did – new grass species have reduced the water and chemicals required for their maintenance – and the same can be said for the resort development surrounding. But convincing the Ministry of Culture that a development of the size planned was not going to affect Motovun in more subjective ways, such as hurting the truffle gathering or have a dramatic visual impact, was going to be too difficult for the pro-Jupiter Adria camp.

Secondly, the Mayor of Motovun, Slobodan Vugrinec, in October turned the simple administrative process of the public discussion of the environmental impact study into a pro-resort political rally packed with supporters to try to impress the local media.

Thirdly, the makeup of the commission was changed. As mentioned in Ranko’s piece, the president of the commission, Dr Velimir Simicic, was fired, and replaced, by the Minister for the Environment Marina Matulovic-Dropulic, with a petty bureaucrat. Dr Simicic, far from being a rabid, tree-hugging, anti-development ‘greenie’, is well known for his pro-golf stance (writing a 1995 golf and tourism piece) but was against this particular development.

Lastly, strangely, other commission members began to change their minds.

So on January 29 it was announced that the commission passed the proposal, although 3 out of 9 members were still opposed to it.

One of the 3 members in opposition was Zlatan Juras. He is also not a ‘pinko’, sandal-wearing lentil-eater. He is Croatia’s first international golf referee, a past member of the national team (Captain at previous European and World Championships), the founder and first president of the Committee for the Rules and Amateur Status of the Croatian Golf Federation, and the chief editor of the Croatian golf magazines Golf World, Golf Magazine and Crogolf.com. If anyone in the whole world would support a golf course in Croatia it would him – but no! – he opposes Jupiter Adria’s unsustainable proposal!

On March 26 the Minister for the Environment announced that it was ratifying the commissions decision. Jupiter Adria is now one step closer to starting the bull-dozers.

Recently other cases have shown that the Motovun result is not unique in Croatia but rather a symptom of weak governance where officials can either be easily convinced of the benefits of such-and-such proposal, easily be bullied by EU officials or simply bought off with foreign money. Rockwool, an EU insulation company, recently commissioned a polluting factory in Istria that received generous tax and environmental breaks; local environmental inspectors were warned by Zagreb to stay away from a Polish-owned metal recycling plant in Split, which has been spewing noxious gases daily. An asbestos factory (Salonit) in Split and two cement works in Istria, which burnt toxic Italian waste as fuel, have only just closed.

As Croatia rushes to join the EU it is also fast becoming its Mexico!

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