Translated material
Bad plan
Moscow officials are ready to give up a third of industrial sites for landscaping
The head of the capital's construction complex, Vladimir Resin, proposed that the city budget partially compensate for the damage to Moscow's environment caused by the industry under his jurisdiction in recent years. Yesterday, at a meeting of the city government, where the general scheme for greening the capital until 2020 was discussed, Mr. Resin, replacing the mayor who had gone on vacation, made a rather unexpected statement. “Instead of doing spot construction, let’s green the city,” he called on officials, explaining that he considers it necessary to allocate up to 30% of the area of vacated industrial areas and landfills in different areas of Moscow for planting trees and lawns. Previously, the head of the construction complex claims, there was simply not enough money to restore nature, but now “the economic situation in the city is stable, and we can start landscaping.”Apparently, the love for natural green color that has awakened among officials can also be explained by the fact that significant funds have actually appeared in the city budget for environmental protection measures. At the end of this year alone, it is planned to spend 3.5 billion budget rubles on setting up parks and public gardens. And besides, this amount may increase if the authorities make the improvement of adjacent territories one of the conditions for the implementation of construction investment contracts. “This may, of course, seem unpleasant to investors, but we cannot retreat from this. By 2020 we must build 70 million square meters. meters of housing, and this should improve Moscow, not worsen it,” explained Mr. Resin. According to him, “ greening has never been asked for as much as for the housing program.”
True, so far there is no one to ask either, since the general landscaping scheme did not seem very detailed to the officials. “The landscaping scheme cannot be called a policy document; to be applied in practice, it requires serious clarification,” said Leonid Bochin, head of the department of natural resources management and environmental protection. In his opinion, from the document “it is not clear whether parks and gardens will really be created in industrial zones.” Mr. Bochin also advised to work out the landscaping scheme in stages, to pay attention to “clear area indicators, comprehensive rehabilitation of coastal zones.” “There is no clarity on how the program will be implemented, because in order to approve a project for landscaping a small area, it now takes the same amount of time as it takes to approve the construction of a 44-storey building,” he said and called for providing every resident of the city with 16 sq. . m of green areas. Due to the lack of complete project documentation, the official believes, there is a risk that the billions allocated for greening the city will not be spent.
The capital's oppositionists, however, believe that this risk is practically zero. According to the leader of the Yabloko - United Democrats faction of the Moscow City Duma, Sergei Mitrokhin, there is a high probability that this money will green the wallets of officials, and not the city. “This whole program is a simple drain on budget funds. The interest of the construction complex in the landscaping program is obvious: it is expanding into economic life,” Mr. Mitrokhin told Vremya Novostey. The deputy believes that in the general landscaping scheme, which, after some modification, is going to be approved by the mayor's office, there are no clear criteria for what exactly is considered landscaping. And this creates the preconditions for abuses in the use of budget funds. “You can lay out a park, or you can install a flowerbed instead or sow a lawn and also call it landscaping,” he explained.