Bulgaria's Plovdiv Won't Get Paid for Hosting Sofia Waste in 2010

Politics » DOMESTIC | July 9, 2010, Friday // 12:10
Bulgaria: Bulgaria's Plovdiv Won't Get Paid for Hosting Sofia Waste in 2010 The waste depot at Tsalapitsa near Plovdiv has accepted 100 000 tonnes of garbage from Sofia. Photo by BGNES

The long-anticipated BGN 15 M which the Plovdiv Municipality is supposed to receive for agreeing to take in thousands of tonnes of garbage from the capital Sofia will probably not be paid in 2010.

This has been made clear by Medna Stoyanova, a MP from Plovdiv and Chair of the Parliamentary Budget Committee.

Plovdiv has allowed Sofia to transport 100 000 tonnes of household waste to its depot in Tsalapitsa as the overcrowded Bulgarian capital has been struggling for years with the lack of proper waste disposal facilities, and the much talked-of waste recycling plant will not be constructed before 2011.

As the government delayed paying the promised sum, the Plovdiv Mayor Slavcho Atanasov, from the VMRO party who was elected with the support of the current ruling party GERB back in 2007, has sent a letter to the state institutions demanding the “garbage money” and slamming the government.

According to MP Menda Stoyanova, the Plovdiv Municipality should be more realistic about getting the money in 2015, a year when the state budget is struggling financially, and the Plovdiv councilors should not have planned to use the funds in this year's budget.

The municipality already made plans to pay for the reconstruction and rehabilitation of several infrastructure projects and nursery schools; some these have already been carried out and the municipality owes money.

The emergency transporting of household waste from Sofia to places around Bulgaria started in November 2009 when the European Commission declared it will file a suit against the Sofia Municipality because of the garbage crisis there and the delayed construction of the waste treatment plant.

The Sofia Municipality has already adopted a decision for transporting 50 000 tonnes of waste to the depot of the city of Lovech in the north at the price of BGN 23 per tonne.

According to the Deputy Sofia Mayor in charge of environmental policies Mariya Boyadzhiyska, a total of 100 000 tonnes of waste from the capital have been deposited at Tsalapitsa near Plovdiv, another 175 000 tonnes in Silistra, and 175 000 tonnes more will go to Harmanli in the southeast.

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Tags: sofia, Plovdiv, Tsalapitsa, waste, waste depot, waste crisis, waste processing plant, waste treatment, Menda Stoyanova, Slavcho Atanasov

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