A draft decree circulating between ministries would impose a ninety day limit on the local authorisations that public works need before construction can start. Miss the deadline and the authorisation is treated as granted. The intention is to stop projects dying quietly in the gap between one office and the next.
Municipal technical offices are not opposed to the deadline. They are pointing at what happens before the clock starts. An application cannot be assessed until it is complete, and completeness depends on documents that come from other bodies: soil surveys, heritage clearances, utility sign offs, and in coastal and mountain areas the hydrogeological opinion. A deadline that runs only from the moment a file is complete moves the delay upstream rather than removing it.
The second objection is about staffing. Smaller comuni run their technical office with a handful of people, several of them shared with neighbouring municipalities on part time arrangements. A rule that turns silence into consent puts a legal weight on those offices that they are not resourced to carry, and the predictable response is defensive: refuse early rather than risk approving by accident.
There is a version of this reform that works, and the officials describing it are unusually specific. Start the clock when the file is submitted rather than when it is complete, publish the list of required documents in one place, and fund the shared technical offices that the smaller municipalities already depend on. That is a slower reform to write and a faster one to work.