#10 - JRL 7302
St. Petersburg Times
August 26, 2003
What Did the 300th Really Do for City Residents?
By Irina Titova
STAFF WRITER
A great hope expressed before St. Petersburg's 300th-anniversary celebrations was that the occasion would provide a much-needed boost to the massive repairs needed by some of the city's decaying sights and crumbling buildings. But while many of the city's historical buildings got at least a new coat of paint on their facades, the ambitious plans made for the repair and construction of some crucial infrastructure are still unrealized.
Into this category fall the metro line between the Lesnaya and Ploshchad Muzhestva metro stations, the completion of the eastern part of the city's Ring Road and the ongoing saga of the long-promised flood-protection barrier.
The metro line between Lesnaya and Ploshchad Muzhestva has been out of action since part of the tunnel collapsed in 1995 due to pressure from an underground river. Some 500,000 residents of the city's northeastern districts still have no direct metro link to the city center.
Officials have repeatedly blamed a lack of financial resources and technical difficulties for the lack of progress.
In November 2002, as the pre-300 rush was gaining momentum, the head of the federal Construction Committee, Nikolai Koshman, finally expressed confidence that the broken line would be repaired by the end of the annivesary year.
According to the City Administration's Transport Committee, however, the line will now only be working again "in the second half of 2004."
"It was planned to complete the work on the metro by the end of this year, but this is a unique project, and has such serious technical difficulties that the term of completion has been changed," committee press secretary Alexei Gerashchenko said in a telephone interview on Monday.
Another big anniversary promise was to finish the construction of about 70 kilometers of the eastern part of the Ring Road. Like the metro, however, this has also now been pushed back.
"So far, only 30 kilometers of the eastern half have been completed," Yevgeny Korolyov, spokesperson for the State Ring Road Construction Board, said in a telephone interview on Monday.
"The work has been going slower than planned due to the lack of financing," Korolyov said. "Now, completion of the eastern part is scheduled for 2005."
Work on the construction of the road, which is meant to ease the flow of transport around St. Petersburg, started in 2001. The project is being financed with federal funding. The construction of the eastern part of the road was budgeted to cost 45 billion rubles ($1.5 billion). However, in 2001, the federal budget allocated just 5 billion rubles ($166 million) for the road, while in 2002 the figure was 6 billion rubles ($200 million).
"It's a very large-scale project and, of course, with only that much money available, it could not be completed," Korolyov said.
Next year, according to Korolyov, the federal budget is planning to allocate more money for the project. Planners are also pinning their hopes on receiving loans of over $100 million loan from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
Although not specifically mentioned as an anniversary-linked project, the flood-protection barrier saw yet another revival of interest in 2003. A tender for the completion of the project, which was started in 1979, was announced, and the EBRD also promised funding of $245 million.
However, despite these failures, the city has seen many positive changes. Since 2000, as part of the celebrations, 78 of St. Petersburg's historical buildings, many overlooked for decades, finally had some attention paid to them.
Among the definite achievements of the anniversary celebrations were the completion of the construction of the Konstantinovsky Palace in the suburb of Strelna, revamped into an official presidential residence; the opening of the reconstructed Amber Room in the Catherine Palace in Pushkin; the revival of long-neglected Sennaya Ploshchad; and the cleaning up of St. Isaac's Cathedral and a number of other sights.
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