We won’t move refuse

According to the Ministry’s plan, Georgi Georgiev, mayor of Botevgrad town (elected on the ticket of one of the ruling parties, the National Movement for Stability and Progress), for example, will have to organise the movement of Botevgrad’s rubbish to sites in Sevlievo or Karlovo, 124km away.

Georgiev, however, said that "we will not send even a single truck to Sevlievo".

According to the Ministry’s projections, Botevgrad will increase its refuse transport costs by a mere 250 000 leva. "I don’t know how they have come up with these figures but our calculations show that sending our rubbish there will cost us another 4.5-5.5 million leva. We don’t have that kind of money and there is nowhere else we can get it from," Georgiev says.

He says that raising the annual municipal refuse tax would not solve the problem either. "Currently, people pay a tax of between 80 and 120 leva for an apartment of 120-150sq m. If we want to cover these additional expenses we need to raise the tax between four and five times. I wonder who would be so foolish as to pay it." In addition, Botevgrad had only six refuse trucks while it would need at least 16 to transport its rubbish to Sevlievo.  

"We will not shut down our refuse site and we will keep on using it after July 16, otherwise things here will start smelling like they do in Sofia," he says.
Sliven mayor Yordan Lechkov (who was elected on GERB’s ticket), agrees. "We will not obey the Ministry’s decision. Bulgaria will be fined by the EC and we will pay the fines but we will not close our site. We haven’t even made calculations about additional costs because we don’t even have the technical ability to separate refuse and move it away," Lechkov says.

According to the Ministry’s plan, Sliven’s refuse should be transported to the refuse site of Harmanli (124km) or to the one in Omurtag (88km).
"Sending our rubbish to Sevlievo or Lovech will double our current costs," says Veronika Slavova from Levski municipality. It was a utopia to think that the amount of refuse could be downsized by separating it or recycling it.    

"This is madness. We haven’t made any projections on transport cost because we neither have the money nor the trucks for it," says Roumen Vidov, mayor of Vidin (elected on GERB’s ticket).

He says that the July 16 deadline should be renegotiated and the construction of new refuse sites intensified. "The Ministry will blame us but it should start negotiations with the EC," Vidov says.