Translated material
The season has opened
The Kolyma region will not become a special tourist zone
Yesterday, the procedure for the official opening of applications from federal subjects for the creation of special economic zones of a tourist and recreational type took place. The formal procedure immediately caused significant losses to a number of regions wishing to develop tourism on their territory on special financial grounds. Of the 28 applications submitted, the commission rejected ten. Although, in order to bypass the first stage, it was enough only to submit a set of documents provided for by law.However, initially the commission was not so cruel. Only the application of the Magadan region - the legendary Kolyma region, the capital of the "GULAG archipelago", immediately received a turnaround, and the votes for and against the application of the Aginsky Buryat Autonomous Okrug were divided in half. Everyone else who had a shortage of documents, at the suggestion of the vice-president of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry Vladimir Strashko, was given a week to submit the missing papers. “A lot of work has been done, maybe people just didn’t fully understand,” he explained the liberalism of the commission.
However, the chairman of the commission, Minister of Economic Development and Trade German Gref did not appreciate such humanism. Appearing at the end of the meeting, he immediately proposed strictly following the letter of the law. “We do not have the authority to change the law. Moreover, everyone else coped with this task. I personally extended the deadline for submitting documents by ten days,” the minister said angrily. The commission did not argue with its leader, and the list of participants in the competition immediately decreased sharply.
The most common reason for refusal, quite in the spirit of the latest trends in Russian economic policy, is the lack of a positive conclusion from the State Environmental Expertise. Considering that mainly tourist and recreational zones are supposed to be developed in specially protected areas, environmental impact assessment is indeed one of the most important documents.
Due to insufficient documents, the Arkhangelsk region, Chuvashia, the Republic of Adygea, the Orenburg region, Karachay-Cherkessia, the Tver region, Tatarstan and the Volgograd region will have to refuse to obtain a tourist zone.
However, in this issue too, there were champions. The Magadan region did not submit six documents out of 25 required, including calculations of federal and local budget expenditures, a map of the zone’s territory and calculations of energy costs. And in the application of the Aginsky Buryat Autonomous Okrug there was no agreement on the creation of a zone as such.
Despite repeated statements about the priority development of the Far East, not a single application was received from these territories. “We really hoped to receive an application from Kamchatka and Primorsky Krai. And their absence means only one thing - insufficient quality of management of the region,” Mr. Gref told reporters. Moreover, the next competition will take place no earlier than in a year and a half.
Future residents of the zone will not receive federal tax benefits; preferences are provided only in terms of local taxes. However, the center will pay for urban planning and infrastructure. In addition, tourist zones will have a unified management system and a simplified procedure for the provision of land plots.
The remaining 18 participants face a very busy month. By October 26, when the results of the competition are summed up, there will be no more than five of them left. True, the Minister of Economic Development promised: “regardless of who the winner is, we will try to help everyone.” But the winners will also receive an additional prize. “Once it becomes clear what investments are required, we will increase funding from the federal budget, currently planned in the amount of 1.1 billion rubles,” explained Mr. Gref.