Once again, Sofia mayor Boiko Borissov seized the opportunity to speak at a business breakfast, organised by the American Chamber of Commerce in Bulgaria (AmCham) on April 3, to express his dissatisfaction and complaints about Bulgaria’s state governance in relation to the capital’s problems. He denounced the law on Sofia budget 2008, as well as Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev’s alleged refusal to discuss the city’s problems, the daily inflow of non-Sofians and the lack of Government support for limiting their number.

Listening to Borissov’s speech, some of the attendees commented that other mayors had concentrated on how to get more money added to their budgets, unlike Borissov’s approach of blaming the Government for its lack of understanding of Sofia’s problems.

Borissov provided some examples, saying, “The city of Sofia contributed one billion leva to the state budget in 2007, but the state is subsidising (only) 200 million leva of the city in 2008.” According to him, the Government was cutting the money the city deserved on purpose. “We have a Government that acts in opposition to Sofia,” he said.

Borissov said that he had been trying for four months to get a meeting with Stanishev with no result. “It seems as if he doesn’t have the time to meet us,” Borissov said.

Borissov quoted Standard & Poor’s survey, which said that in 2006 direct foreign investment in Sofia grew by 27 per cent, reaching $3 billion, or 53 per cent of the investment in Bulgaria in general. “As a ‘reward’ the Government is depriving us of money,” Borissov said. At the same time, the city was annually putting, on average, 150 million leva more than the year before into the state budget, he said.

Moreover, Borissov claimed that too many people were coming to live in Sofia without registering and the population could not be counted. Between 400 and 800 new cars are registered in the city each day. “Which city in the world can construct an underground parking for between 400 and 800 cars daily?” Borissov said. Even for the existing problems, according to him, the state was giving no tools to decrease the number of people arriving in Sofia.

Sofia chief architect Petar Dikov’s speech was in line with the words of his superior, though his angle was more business orientated.

“Public-private partnerships (PPP) are a problem that worry us seriously. As world experience from the past 20 years has shown, PPPs are one of the ways cities have realised successful urban development. Unfortunately in Bulgaria there is no legal basis to develop PPPs. I am making attempts to create our own regulations because such a legislative act does not exist,” Dikov said to the potential investors.

According to Dikov, such PPPs were a way to decrease the number of people coming to Sofia every day, thus causing traffic jams and blocking parking areas.

Sofia municipality was trying to start closer co-operation with neighbouring municipalities, to where some of the investments could be redirected, “in order to decrease the demographic pressure on Sofia. We think that by expanding investors’ interests to outside Sofia, we can help other municipalities, because a large share of the traffic accumulated in rush hour is a consequence of the big inflow of one-day visitors, who live in neighbouring municipalities and work in Sofia”, Dikov said.

Like Borissov, Dikov had something to say about the Government’s lack of support. “Sofia city has not received special support by the state in relation to the municipal project to support businesses by developing municipal terrains. Therefore, the city decided to have closer co-operation with Sofia businesses and to develop a programme for creating high-tech productions within the city,” Dikov said.

After reading a list of complaints from the Government, both Borissov and Dikov showed what they had done for the past three years.

Potential investors in Sofia heard that the ambition of Sofia municipality ambition for 2008 was to once again increase the city’s credit rating after it rose in 2007. Borissov talked about the city’s priorities, such as faster execution of investment projects. Then, again, Borissov said that the city hall relied on state support for many of these projects. Other means for financing were European Union funds, loans and money from privatisation deals, as well as optimising the work by decreasing corruption practise of municipal companies.

He said that the city was doing its best to achieve financial transparency. “We regard this as very important for us.”

Borissov further said that a three-years investment plan had been prepared. It included a middle-term investment plan covering the city’s main infrastructure projects, the debt prognoses and Sofia municipality’s financial balance.

“Sofia’s priorities include the metro expansion, which will eat up 62 per cent of the capital programme expenses, improvement of the household waste system and road repairs,” Borissov said, hinting as to where most of investments in Sofia would go.

In the conclusion to his speech, Borissov said that despite the small budget he was left with by the Government, he thought that his administration was “doing a good job”.

Back to PPPs, Dikov said that Business Park Sofia was a successful model for PPPs. He described it as one of the most successful investment projects in Bulgaria. The project Acropolis in western Sofia was also a big project, as was the Sofia Airport zone, “which would probably be the fastest developing zone in the coming few years.”

Despite the dark scenes pictured by Borissov and Dikov, business people heard that there was hope for some positive development in Sofia. More than 18 million leva have been allocated in the 2008 Sofia budget for developing construction projects, “which is considerably higher than any previous year,” Dikov said. According to him, this was going to enable the city to start “massive construction activity” in 2009.

Also by the end of April, many auctions for car park constructions will be started as PPPs. A second procedure on choosing a constructor for the second metro line will also begin in April or May, after the first one failed.