Moscow Consensus

Sergei Sobyanin proposed to Boris Gromov a unified strategy for the development of the capital region

In the near future, Moscow and the Moscow region, if they do not formally unite into one region, will certainly develop the main sectors of the economy in a single manner. Yesterday, during a meeting of the joint board of executive authorities of Moscow and the Moscow region, the capital's mayor Sergei Sobyanin announced, in particular, the need to coordinate master plans for the development of neighboring territories. Actually, the fact that the board, which also existed under Yuri Luzhkov, resumed its work at the level of regional heads, speaks of the readiness of officials for a constructive dialogue. “Today’s meeting of the board is fateful; a reset of our relations begins,” said the governor of the Moscow region, Boris Gromov.

Let us recall that Mr. Luzhkov’s relations with the leadership of the Moscow region have become openly hostile in recent years. The joint board of executive bodies of state power of the two regions has existed since 2001, but negotiations between neighbors took place exclusively at the level of mid-level officials. In the absence of leaders, ordinary bureaucrats, as a rule, were unable to agree on many controversial issues, including such important ones as establishing the boundaries of two regions. The inability to find common ground on a number of financial issues, such as the policy of maintaining benefits for commuter transport, was fraught with the emergence of pockets of social instability. But after the change of mayor, there was a clear thaw in these relations. The new mayor of Moscow, Sergei Sobyanin, literally immediately after his appointment, went to a meeting with Boris Gromov to discuss issues of road development in the capital region. Yesterday, the heads of the two regions continued the dialogue on “the development of the commodity distribution network of the city of Moscow and the Moscow region.”

In particular, as reported by the Moscow Government Information Center, the mayor and governor discussed the development of a unified automated highway management system, the development of public transport and freight transportation, as well as suburban railway traffic. A tripartite agreement was prepared between the city government, the administration of the Moscow region and JSC Russian Railways, providing, for example, for the replacement of rolling stock on suburban routes of the Moscow transport hub, the development of high-speed transportation and the construction of new railway lines. According to the chief architect of Moscow, Alexander Kuzmin, transport workers from neighboring regions will have to jointly develop a scheme for transport interchange hubs. It is necessary, in his opinion, to put in order the departure routes between Moscow and the Moscow region, expanding the lanes on the routes in the direction of the region within 15-20 km. MKAD.

According to Boris Gromov, the energy sector of the Moscow region cannot develop separately from Moscow. “We will create a single general scheme,” he said. And, according to Sergei Sobyanin, it is necessary to include the modernization of healthcare and a unified waste disposal program in plans for the joint development of regions.

The mayor of Moscow believes that a “normal working atmosphere” has now been established in regional administrations. “We will determine government action plans and coordinate development plans for the territories. The documents will lay the foundations for regional development in order to correct the existing imbalances, in particular imbalances in the field of urban planning policy, housing placement, economics, and business,” said the capital’s mayor. Judging by his words, one of the main imbalances at the moment is the inconsistency of urban planning decisions of the leadership of neighboring territories. “But we have a consensus in all these areas,” Mr. Sobyanin emphasized.

The Moscow City Duma is confident that under the new mayor of the capital it will be possible to resolve a number of issues that have remained unresolved for decades. Chairman of the commission for long-term development and urban planning of the capital's parliament, Mikhail Moskvin-Tarkhanov, believes that in the near future the leaders of neighboring regions will put an end to the dispute over the borders of Moscow and the Moscow region. In a conversation with a Vremya Novostei correspondent, he recalled that a dozen points in the two regions do not have a regulated legal status. According to him, there are problems with defining boundaries, for example, in Novoperedelkino, Novokosin, Shcherbinka and other new microdistricts. “Gromov is not interested in showing his integrity, as he did with Luzhkov,” the deputy believes. Mikhail Moskvin-Tarkhanov expects that this will make it possible to finalize the approval by the authorities of the Moscow region of the master plan for the development of Moscow. “The General Plan establishes the boundaries that Moscow considered appropriate, and formally the region agreed to the document with the exception of the boundaries,” he said.

Representatives of the city opposition expect that the result of joint work with Moscow region officials will be the recognition of the general plan of Moscow as untenable. The leader of the Yabloko party, Sergei Mitrokhin, who is seeking to have the general plan declared invalid in court, believes that the procedure for canceling the city’s main urban planning document is now unavoidable. “According to the Moscow town planning code, amendments to the general plan can only be made three years after its adoption,” Mr. Mitrokhin reminded Vremya Novostei. In his opinion, “this fundamental document in urban planning policy needs to be changed not with cosmetic amendments, but fundamentally.”

Yulia KHOMCHENKO