Translated material
This is "Our City"!
Newspaper "Our City"
Budget money is spent on maintaining the “combat leaflet” of United Russia called “Our City”.
In fact, municipal authorities are prohibited from establishing and publishing official socio-political newspapers at their own expense. This is stated in the federal law “On the General Principles of the Organization of Local Self-Government” and in the Budget Code. In Kirov they are trying to circumvent this ban in every possible way. And not at all out of simplicity of heart, but for the benefit of one well-known party.
In 2008, justifying the need for the appearance of the newspaper “Our City,” Mayor Vladimir Bykov and his subordinates convinced the public that the new publication would objectively cover the activities of the City Duma and the city administration. It will also become an operational official publisher of regulatory legal acts.
One can also argue about efficiency: recently in Our City, for example, a resolution of the head of the city administration was published on holding public hearings on one of the land plots built up with apartment buildings. The hearing was scheduled to take place on March 15. And, I’m sure, they took place, only without interested representatives of those same houses. Because they learned about the date of the hearing from a newspaper published... March 30th.
The newspaper "Our City" was half a month late
But there is no smell of objectivity and balanced position in “Our City”. From the very beginning, it became obvious that at the expense of the townspeople, representatives of the “BBK” bloc (Berezin - Bykov - Krepostnov) were getting free PR in it . And closer to the last elections, it generally turned into a propaganda organ of this bloc (which was suspected even during the period when “Our City” was just being created).
The fact that in February and early March this newspaper over and over again published “filthy” articles against opposition parties and their candidates in the City Duma elections can still be somehow justified: the City Duma at that time still consisted of almost 100 percent representatives of “ EdRa". But what happens after, as a result of the elections in the Duma, full-fledged factions of Right Russia, communists and Zhirinovites appeared, does not fit into any framework: “the newspaper of the municipal formation “City of Kirov””, as if nothing had happened, continues to “screw “The opposition, already in the person of elected deputies, who are called nothing more than “henchmen of some political forces” and “odious figures” who have “gone stupid”, demonstrating “a clear disregard for the interests of the population.”
"Our City" about the opposition
"Our City" about Zakalat
Such expressions would be quite appropriate in the party publication of United Russia, but not in the official “free newspaper”, which simply does not have the right to engage in political propaganda in favor of one of the factions of the City Duma.
Meanwhile, “Our City” is published with taxpayers’ money, and a lot of money: the business plan, drawn up on the eve of its appearance, assumed that the newspaper would require 8 million budget rubles in the first two years, but “in the end it will remain alone in the city” and will be published self-sufficiency - through income from advertising and retail sales. This March it turned three years old, but no income has appeared, and instead of paying off at the end of last year, an additional 1.7 million rubles had to be allocated from the city budget for its publication. And not directly (the law directly prohibits it), but under the article “municipal management”.
The official founder of “Our City” is MU “City Advertising”. At first, it was they who bore the burden of financing the newspaper—at the expense of the municipal institution’s own revenues, which did not reach the budget. Now the “Berezina-Bykov-serf” government has finally become bolder and decided that it is possible to feed the “pocket organ” directly from budget funds. To camouflage the publication of the newspaper, it was called a “municipal service “Information provision of the population of the urban district through print media.” Recently, the city administration approved the procedure for calculating the volume of budget expenditures for the provision of this “service”.
The calculation is very simple - based on the annual salary needs of “personnel engaged in the provision of municipal services” (read: employees of the editorial office of “Our City”), in “material reserves” and “consumables”, in costs for communication services, transport, utilities and etc. That is, for the full “state provision” of the newspaper, from which no income is anymore required.
Why not? After all, it is not only the prosecutor’s office that is silent, which should have long ago brought the actions of the city authorities into compliance with the law. The newly elected opposition deputies are also silent and patient. Why, really, in this case, refuse to “milk” the budget to satisfy the interests of individual managers.