Heh... it’s a stimulus plan I guess. ;’) Seriously, this is an infrastructure buildout that Sicilians should worry about, it’ll bring in a lot of crime from mainland Italy.
During the Punic Wars, specifically, during that 16 years Hannibal spent terrorizing Italy, one of the methods the Romans used to keep him from marching south toward possible reinforcement by sea and reconquest of Sicily, was a scorched-Earth policy, so his army wouldn’t be able to make it. It’s scenic country, but very hard (as the Allies noticed as they fought their way north in WWII).
Anyway, I read somewhere that the Romans never got around to fixing what they broke, probably because the three dozen “noble” families A) didn’t own it and B) didn’t want the competition.