| The Cabinet of Ministers teaches regions to look for money for road construction An unexpected obstacle has stood in the way of President Vladimir Putin's ambitious plan to double GDP by 2010. This may be prevented by the second eternal Russian problem - roads.
“This problem (the condition of roads. - Ed. ) has always been relevant, and now it is especially acute, since we are solving the problem of doubling GDP by 2010, and roads can become a bottleneck,” said Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov, opening yesterday's government meeting. According to him, freight turnover should increase 1.8 times in the coming years, and thousands and thousands of kilometers of highways are in poor condition.
The Cabinet of Ministers was thinking yesterday about how to minimize the negative impact of impassability on the implementation of presidential plans. For a more specific conversation, we even had to adjust the meeting agenda on the fly. Having started with a discussion of the program for the modernization and development of highways for the period until 2025, the government smoothly moved on to a discussion around the “Highways” subprogram of the federal target program “Modernization of the Russian Transport System”, which, like doubling GDP, is calculated just before 2010.
The subject of discussion was outlined by the Minister of Transport and Communications Igor Levitin. He painted a bleak picture. At least a third of federal roads and 15% of bridges are in unsatisfactory technical condition. The quality of roads is generally a separate issue. Some of them need to be repaired every year, while in other countries with similar climatic conditions, coatings last seven to nine years from repair to repair. Here the materials fail, and there is a constant pursuit of cheap construction. Although constant repairs eat up all the imaginary savings.
Another negative trend: the pace of road construction lags behind the growth in the number of cars. The vehicle fleet is increasing by 7-10% per year, and the overall increase in the length of roads in the country was, for example, less than 1% in 2003. The minister admitted that if emergency measures are not taken, then by 2010 the load on the roads will increase fourfold, and traffic speeds will decrease by 20%. In megacities, traffic will stop altogether. At the same time, over 60% of roads will not meet operational requirements, and the number of accidents will increase by 40-45%. On such roads it is clearly impossible to reach the doubling of GDP.
As usual, the conversation turned to the lack of money. It turned out that the Russian Highways subprogram was underfunded by 200 billion rubles in the first three years of implementation. This was one of the reasons for the decrease in the volume of financing of the road industry in the structure of GDP - from 2.9% in 2000 to 1.5% in 2003. At the same time, as Igor Levitin emphasized, in developed countries this figure reaches 3-4% of GDP.
But that's only half the story. The other half "hidden" in the regions. Representatives of the Yaroslavl and Novosibirsk regions unanimously complained that there is no financial basis for the development of road infrastructure in the constituent entities of the federation; funds from taxes are only enough to maintain existing roads. The governor of the Novosibirsk region, Viktor Tolokonsky, generally stated that the money coming from local taxpayers is only enough for him to clear the roads of snow. The ex-colleagues were supported by the head of the Ministry of Natural Resources Yuri Trutnev, in the recent past the governor of the Perm region. He reproached the Ministry of Finance for the fact that “in the last five years there has been an annual deterioration in the financing of road funds, both in relative and absolute terms.”
In the end, one of the participants in the discussion proposed returning the one percent tax on road users, which had been abolished since 2003, from which the regions drew funds for the needs of road funds. However, Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Zhukov immediately stopped the sedition. As head of the State Duma Budget Committee, he did a lot to abolish turnover taxes, which have the most negative impact on the economy, and to reduce the tax burden in general. Mr. Zhukov, in an unusually harsh manner for him, stated that turnover taxes cannot be introduced, otherwise there will be problems with economic growth. He suggested that regions take a more responsible approach to spending their own funds and not forget about road construction. At the same time, he recalled that today subjects have much more rights to spend their money as they see fit.
The head of the Ministry of Finance, Alexei Kudrin, finally tried to set the regions on the right path. He recalled that with the abolition of turnover taxes, it was decided that the regions would use revenues from land tax, excise tax on petroleum products, transport tax and the 1.5% income tax transferred to the subjects to finance road infrastructure. However, in the regions they do not adhere to such a scheme, directing part of these funds to other purposes. According to him, if all the required revenues were spent on roads, then this year the regions would be able to accumulate 204 billion rubles. And now their budgets as a whole provide only 112 billion for road construction. The skirmish between the center and the regions ended with the Prime Minister’s order to Alexei Kudrin, in the process of preparing the 2004 budget, to once again analyze the sources of financing for road work in the constituent entities.
People are naturally interested in the question of when toll roads will appear in Russia. Looks like it won't be anytime soon. Although the government admits that the situation with roads in Russia cannot be corrected only through the budget, they do not yet know how to attract respectable private investors to the industry. Igor Levitin proposed, for example, to give investors the management of not only the road they built, but also the adjacent lands - for a faster payback of the project. However, the country has not yet adopted a single legislative act allowing the construction and operation of toll roads. For example, there is no law on concessions. Mr. Levitin believes that this particular form of property management could be used in the road sector.
The Ministry of Transport promises to name the first options for laying toll highways by October 1, 2004. However, Mr. Levitin has already lifted the veil of secrecy. The first toll roads should be a new exit to the Moscow Ring Road from the M-1 "Belarus" highway (this section of about 20 km will help relieve the always congested first kilometers of the Minsk Highway) and bypasses of the cities of Klin and Solnechnogorsk on the M-10 Moscow - St. Petersburg highway . At the same time, a mandatory condition for laying a toll road will remain the presence of a free “backup” of such a route. Mikhail VOROBYEV |
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