Fall trajectory

As they say, patience and work... In the long-term catering epic on the corner of Svetlanovskaya Square and Engels Avenue, a final point has finally been made: there will be no BlinDonalts in the middle of Medvedev Square. The day before yesterday, Smolny in one fell swoop canceled all four, adopted one after another over the course of four years (already ridiculous!), resolutions on the design and construction of a restaurant instead of larches, birches and maples, protected by the ZNOP law. Let us remind you that in order to save the green zone, residents persistently asked to give it the name of the President of the Russian Federation.

Well, without any self-praise, this is our common resounding victory (see Novaya No. 54, 60, 77, 92, 94 for 2007, No. 28 for 2008).
Decrees of the government of St. Petersburg dated December 14, 2004 No. 1977, dated August 23, 2005 No. 1255, dated October 25, 2006 No. 1315, dated December 4, 2007 No. 1569 were declared invalid overnight. All of them concerned one “socially significant” object: the future restaurant of the BlinDonalts brand. Residents were indignant, protested, demanded, appealed to common sense, pointed out gross mistakes, and officials with manic persistence extended and signed - and so on from year to year. They used so much paper alone! And how many performers regularly received a salary for this (from our money)... As can be seen from the date, the last Smolny document on the implementation of the scandalous project on the site of a protected green zone was published after the law on ZNOP came into force.
“Yes, they probably made a mistake, but everything there has already been cut down for this restaurant, it was resold... It is necessary to complete the construction, this is my opinion, since this has happened,” said Vice-Governor Alexander Vakhmistrov without hesitation in April 2008.
And yet it didn’t work out like a sergeant-major. The city is terminating the lease agreement for the relevant land plot, which has been expired several times by investors. The official reason was that the merchants had not fulfilled their obligations for a long period. Only now were you smart enough to understand this? At the same time, officials unofficially admit that the outcome of the case (read: the adoption of such a decision) was ultimately influenced by the consistent and persistent struggle of local residents for their square. It’s not that they were ashamed or moved - it’s just that the scandal gained too wide and unwanted publicity; they say the echo even reached the Kremlin.
“Of course, this is not an accident,” Alexander Karpov, head of the EKOM examination center, commented on the situation for Novaya. “Firstly, the townspeople, the defenders of the park and square, themselves strictly followed the law in all their actions and demanded the same from the authorities. The other side is the publicity of this process.
This means that it was not in vain that the Swetlpl initiative group created a page on LiveJournal where every step of the developer was tracked.
Through the tireless work of enthusiasts, all materials sent to authorities, all answers sent from there, recordings of telephone conversations, reports on meetings in public places, photo and video files were quickly posted on the Internet. In general, day after day, the entire chronology of events was recorded and reflected online, and thus the absurdity of fast food Santa Barbara became more and more obvious.
For example, now everyone knows that construction began with a monstrous mistake, when the original documentation “slightly mixed up” the countries of the world. And then, much later, it was necessary to clarify that the northeast in this context should be considered northwest, and vice versa. Further errors were strung together, they were also made public, discussed, found their way into the media - and eventually the mass reached a critical level.
This made the victory natural.
At the moment, the foundation pit “on Svetlana” has been filled in, the fence around the construction site has been completely dismantled. Residents cleaned up the area and removed trash. “All that remains is to plant trees to replace the lost ones - at the expense of the party responsible for their destruction, of course,” the activists add.
The question of whether it is worth continuing to seek to name the square after Dmitry Medvedev remains open.

Valeria STRELNIKOVA
Photo by Sergei ERMOKHIN, from the Novaya archive

Meanwhile
The other day, the construction fence at 15/2 Pulkovskoye Shosse, which had been in place for two years and caused numerous complaints from residents of the Moskovsky district, was completely demolished - only the security guard's booth and the logs standing along the perimeter of the site remained.
The decree on survey work on this site was issued back in April 2003, but for several years the investor of the proposed shopping and entertainment complex, JSC Dorinda, never erected anything - except for a fence, which was broken from time to time and decorated with protest slogans.
And yet, despite the massive dissatisfaction of the townspeople and common sense, the construction time was extended. In January 2009 they end again.
“According to SGSNE information, the design documentation has not yet been provided to the Construction Committee, and permission to carry out construction and installation work has not been issued,” says the deputy’s request to the governor.
It is clear that in two months on a construction site where no work was carried out, it is almost impossible to erect even a prefabricated panel structure, not to mention a permanent building. However, according to the governor’s response, the “feasibility of constructing” the shopping complex will be re-examined at a meeting of the St. Petersburg government “after the completion date of construction.”
At the same time, the metal sheets, which until recently were called fencing, have already been removed. “The GATI confirmed to us that the developer was simply tired of paying endless fines in response to our complaints, and, having failed to properly complete the documents for construction, they decided to dismantle the ill-fated fence themselves,” explained the leader of the public organization “Moon Sickle” Georgy Khokhlov. According to Georgy and his associates, during the blockade, the site withdrawn from public use became heavily overgrown and fell into disrepair. “In the future, we will definitely seek the repeal of the construction decree and landscaping of the territory,” residents emphasize.