A fairly typical situation: the local budget doesn’t have enough money to fully repair all the roads. And, speaking purely on a human level, it’s very hard to keep poking the local administration with a sharp stick over potholes in the roads. There’s no money, after all, and the officials look at you with the eyes of Puss in Boots from Shrek. So what can a RosYama activist do in a situation like this? Something very simple: make sure that the money that is spent on road repairs is not wasted. Here is a textbook example. The city of Yaroslavl has a chronic budget deficit—more than 1 billion rubles annually. Even so, money is allocated for road repairs, and roads do get repaired. The only thing left is the simplest part: find and read a contract for the repair of some road, and compare what is written in the contract with what was actually done. Dobrynina Street turned up. RosYama coordinator Fyodor Yezeev simply went to Yaroslavl and visited Dobrynina Street. He walked the whole area on foot and inspected everything with his own eyes. He found a whole bunch of unfinished work and discrepancies. He wrote them down by hand on a sheet of paper. Then he wrote to Yaroslavl City Hall about the discrepancies he had found between what public money had been paid for and what the contractors had actually done. His LiveJournal post contains a detailed report on this trip. In short: there were no road markings, the planned pedestrian crossing was missing, and small potholes had already started forming in the middle of the road. And the contractor had received 28 million rubles, won the tender without any competition, at the maximum price, so the residents of Yaroslavl are fully entitled to demand IDEAL quality from it and strict compliance with warranty obligations. Yaroslavl City Hall sent a reply saying that an inspection had been carried out and that the defects had been identified and corrected.
Fyodor, of course, went back and checked again. Everything was confirmed. The road markings had been painted.
The inspection trench was filled in.
A new pedestrian crossing was installed.
A 4-meter-wide pedestrian path leading to it was built.
The joint between the asphalt lanes was sealed with bitumen, along with the newly formed potholes.
They even unexpectedly added a third lane before the intersection for right turns.
Even though a utility pole had to be moved to make room for that third lane.
This clearly shows how a single complaint can quickly “shrink the bribery-friendly space available to crooks”. Let’s extend this excellent practice to all recently repaired roads. To do that, go to the public procurement website, find all the road repair contracts for your local municipality there (the easiest way is to search by the municipality’s taxpayer ID number), choose the street closest to you, read the technical specifications carefully, and then go out and inspect it on the ground. And if something doesn’t match, file a complaint demanding that it be fixed. Yes, this is a bit more complicated than filing a traffic police complaint using RosYama’s template. But the potential anti-corruption effect is much greater too. For those who can’t hack their way through the jungle of the procurement website, representatives of the Anti-Corruption Foundation have selected several freshly repaired roads in different regions of Russia. There was only one selection criterion: the contract was awarded without competition in the bidding and without any price reduction. Accordingly, as already said above, we are entitled to demand IDEAL quality, and no talk of “insufficient funding” will wash here. Vladimir Region, the Vladimir–Gus-Khrustalny–Kuma road, km 98–99 section. Vladimir Region, the road from Ivanovo to the M7 highway Chelyabinsk Region, M5 section, km 1675–1680 Smolensk Region, repair of the A-141 Bryansk–Smolensk highway Tver Region, repair of the Tver–Bezhetsk–Vesyegonsk–Ustyuzhna road, km 56+800 to 60+000 section Yaroslavl Region, repair of a section of Yaroslavskaya Street in the right-bank part of the town of Tutayev. Moscow Region, Lyubertsy, repair of Kalarash Street. Or here’s a list of 3,500 road repair contracts from across Russia, each worth at least 5 million rubles. Go for it, citizens. Fighting crooks is interesting. (and write to us about the results).