entrusted the Legislative Assembly with Smolny officials

Yesterday the second reading of the program for the socio-economic development of St. Petersburg for 2005-2008 took place in the city Legislative Assembly. During the discussion, deputies revised a number of key parameters of the document. Considering that Smolny made a mistake when calculating the future well-being of the townspeople, parliamentarians set a higher bar for the government, which officials, however, easily agreed to. After all, not a single word about responsibility for failure to implement the program appeared in it.
The Socio-Economic Development Program (SED) of St. Petersburg for 2005-2008 is a document that unites all economic initiatives of Smolny. His main thesis is to reduce poverty by 2008, increase the birth rate and life expectancy in St. Petersburg, as well as increase investment in the fixed capital of local enterprises and double the GRP. In fact, this is the basis for solving the task declared by Governor Valentina Matvienko to achieve “European standards” of life in the region entrusted to her. It is not surprising that the Economic Development Committee (CERPPT) of Smolny took the preparation of the program very seriously. To the point that in April, when a preliminary discussion of the document took place in the Legislative Assembly, officials made the event closed to the press, fearing public criticism (Kommersant wrote about this). Indeed, there was some criticism: parliamentarians considered the SER program “an unsubstantiated declaration, many of the figures of which do not mean anything.” And yet, in the summer, the Legislative Assembly approved it in the first reading.
Yesterday's second reading also ended successfully, although the deputies discovered that a number of indicators in the SER program diverged from the CERPPT forecasts, and in the calculations, not official reports from the St. Petersburg Committee of Statistics were used, but the committee’s “own data.” They decided to remove the discrepancies with the help of amendments prepared by deputy Nikita Ananov. Thus, it was proposed to raise the ratio of average per capita income to the subsistence level in 2008 from 3.62 to 4.36. By that time, the number of St. Petersburg residents whose incomes will remain below the subsistence level should be no more than 10%, and not 11.5%, as officials envisaged. As for the average per capita income, it should be 17 thousand rubles, not 14.1 thousand. Vice-Governor Mikhail Oseevsky, who presented the program to the people’s representatives, did not argue. According to him, the actual growth rate of the St. Petersburg economy will be able to ensure the implementation of the increased indicators, after which the amendments were adopted.
Let us note that these amendments do not remove the claims that the Department of Territorial Development of the Ministry of Economic Development of the Russian Federation made to the draft program in August. The Ministry of Economic Development sent its negative conclusion to the Legislative Committee, in which it indicated that the text of the project lacks not only such an important section as an assessment of current measures to improve the socio-economic situation of the subject, but also a description of the mechanism for implementing the program. As a result, “it is not possible to assess the effectiveness of the proposed measures.”
When asked by Kommersant to comment on these claims, Mr. Oseevsky said yesterday that he “does not find them to be of any significance.” Let us note that at one time the developers refused to include in the text of the program provisions prescribing liability for its non-fulfillment. The amendment, which proposed to consider “significant non-fulfillment” of the program as grounds for a vote of no confidence in the vice-governors of Smolny, was just as successfully rejected by the deputies themselves yesterday.
MIKHAIL SHEVCHUK

Newspaper "Kommersant St. Petersburg" No. 183 dated September 29, 2005, p. 2

Irresponsible commitments