About the development of urban spaces and comfortable places for public leisure. It’s a fashionable topic these days.
As you know, the largest skate park in Europe recently opened in Moscow. It was inaugurated by Sobyanin, who spoke at length about how wonderful the park is.
Of course, all the Sobyanin-and-Kapkov-oriented commentators burst into squeals of delight, metaphorically turning their imaginary baseball caps backward. Not just like in Europe, but bigger than Europe. Wow.
So you can imagine my surprise when the other day I read the following article in *Afisha* (a Russian culture and lifestyle magazine):
“My grandmother makes neater mounds of salad than this”: riders on the skate park at VDNH
I know absolutely nothing about skate parks or rollerblading, but I trust *Afisha*’s experts completely. The park turned out badly. I figured they must simply have spent very little on it and cut corners.
I asked Lyubov Sobol from the ACF (Anti-Corruption Foundation) to find out how much was actually spent.
As it turns out, they didn’t economize at all—quite the opposite. The design work alone cost 23 million rubles in 2012 prices.
If we’re spending 23 million rubles on the design alone, then you’d expect that design to be absolutely extraordinary, because a skate park is not a conservatory or a nuclear power plant. For that kind of money, we could have hired the best designer in the world—not, forgive me, a company called BalticStroyCompany LLC, which for some unknown reason the Moscow mayor’s office decided to trust.
But perhaps the design was brilliant and the execution was poor? Maybe the builders weren’t given enough money?
Wrong again: the builders were given a great deal of money. A certain CityStroyService LLC received 209,154,365.44 rubles from us. I think you’ve probably already guessed this, but just in case, I’ll point out that competition in the tender was minimal: Starting price — 221,327,370.79 Winning bid — 209,154,365.44 Out of 10 applications, 6 were not admitted to participate. Four companies took part. Of those, the second parts of the bids from two companies were found not to comply with the documentation. So in reality, only 2 companies actually participated.
The rejected bidders were upset and filed four complaints about the customer’s actions — http://zakupki.gov.ru/pgz/public/action/orders/info/check_result_list/show?source=epz¬ificationId=6003606 The complaint from TRANSGIDROSTROY LLC was even признали justified, but that led to no consequences: the order from the FAS (Federal Antimonopoly Service) was not enforced. The Prosecutor’s Office should have dealt with this, but for some reason it did not.
Under the contract, the work was supposed to be completed within 90 calendar days (a sure sign of a corrupt arrangement between the customer and the contractor). From June 19, 2013 to September 18, 2013. In reality, however, the park opened a year later—on 07.09.2014. A fivefold overrun of the completion deadline did not bother anyone. No claims were made against anyone. Even though under the contract, CityStroyService was in fact supposed to pay 1% per day for every day of delay:
Our wonderful winner, the company that built the largest skate park in Europe—one unfit for skating—“CityStroyService,” taxpayer ID 7816451201, has been regularly winning Moscow tenders since 02.05.2012, especially for urban improvement projects. In fact, since then they have won only these kinds of tenders, only in Moscow, and almost all of them in Ostankino.
In total, the company has “won” government contracts worth 3.8 billion rubles. We do not know for certain what percentage of those 3.8 billion rubles was kicked back to people in the Moscow mayor’s office. My personal guess, based on previous observations and the example of this wonderful skate park, is that about a billion rubles was carried back to them.
So that’s the story of public spaces—and probably also of why our city’s mayor’s office put so much effort into keeping candidates with different views on how money should be spent on developing those public spaces off the ballot.