In Election Gear - Road Repairs in Bulgaria

By Maria Radmilova

The Pass of the Republic which links southern and northern Bulgaria will be open in early December, and will become the most convenient connection between Rousse, on the Danube and the Turkish border, according to the announcement of Vladimir Tserovski, Bulgaria's Regional Development Minister. The project's worth is 14.7 million euro, 40 pct of which come from the state budget, and the remainder comes under EU Transit Roads 3 programme. The final repairs of the four stretches are expected to be completed at the end of May 2005.

The minister's inspection at the site was an appropriate occasion for him to call upon construction companies to work rapidly, and extra-time if necessary, to utilise the funds that the government has extended for road repairs. Thus, Tserovski officially bolstered the campaign for the 2005 general election. In Bulgaria, the elections and the road barricades (in the form of first sods, or opening freshly asphalted stretches) usually go hand in hand. A similar scenario will be put into action in the remaining nine months to the election. It is by no means coincidental that the government has found 170 million levs ($1=1.52 Bulgarian levs) in budget surplus that will be earmarked for repairs of second- and third-class roads for which the money had always been short so far. The Regional Development Minister also forecast that 100 million levs would be added to the 2005 budget of the Roads Executive Agency, compared to 290-300 million levs for 2004. Should this proposal be voted during the adoption of the 2005 budget, it would mean that some 400 million levs would be invested only from the budget. Additionally, up to 130 million levs are expected to come from vignette taxes that will be mandatory as of 2005. Thus, the overall funding for roads would reach 530 million levs.

Until 2003, Roads Executive Agency's annual budget stood at more than 400 million levs, of which up to 80 million levs went for repairs, and 20 million levs for salaries of the road administration. The remaining money, approximately 300 million levs, were earmarked for major overhauls, rehabilitations, and road construction and also for co-financing projects under the EU programmes. Bulgaria also gets significant funding for road repairs and modernisation under EU programmes Transit Roads 3, Phare - Cross Border Cooperation, and ISPA.

ROADS ARE A BLACK HOLE FOR STATE MONEY

Understandably, there is nothing wrong in spending money on repairs and building roads in Bulgaria. The problem here is that we have witnessed numerous pre-election efforts before, the only memory of which is the huge amount of money that was spent; only a year after there is nothing that can remind of the poor-quality repairs. There are ample fears that this year will be no exception. Road engineers have already forecast that because of the tight schedule many sites will be worked on in a hurry, which will result in repairs with suspicious quality at exorbitant prices.

According to estimates of the Bulgarian Chamber of Industry, currently 60 pct of the national road network (11,568 km of a total of 19,280 km) is in need of urgent repairs. A great part of the national and municipal roads has not been repaired for the last 20-25 years, compared to a normative schedule of 5-7 years for periodical and 12 years for an overhaul.

The lack of budgetary funds was compensated in 1994 with the start of the programmes with EU participation. It is under this practice that a great many of the first-class roads were repaired in the past years. The repairs, however, are periodically accompanied by suspicions of syphoning off money, or corruption practices.

In past years, the Roads Executive Agency's central laboratory used to make three to four checks a year. Traditionally, intensive checking actions are done after elections, in search of weak places of the preceding government; they are not done on a regular basis to ensure the quality of road repairs. This explains to a great extent why a considerable number of road construction firms keep playing tricks uninterruptedly, by joining schemes with counterfeit invoices, or using raw materials with a suspicious quality included.