Sofia city hall will postpone repairs of Tsarigradsko Chaussee, one of the busiest traffic thoroughfares of the city, for next year over lack of funds, mayor Boiko Borissov said on August 19, as quoted by Dnevnik daily.

The city hall planned to repair the stretch between Peyo Yavorov Boulevard and the neighbourhood of Goroublyane in August, but had to scrap the plans because the Cabinet did not provide the 20 million leva needed for the works.

"To wait for funding from the state is the same as waiting for a letter from a dead person," the daily quoted Borissov as saying at the opening of the freshly-repaired Alexander Pushkin Street.

The city could afford to wait a year because the repairs were not urgent. The money will be earmarked in the 2009 city budget, Borissov said.

The Tsarigradsko Chaussee stretch between Orlov Most (Eagles Bridge) and Yavorov Boulevard, which was repaired last year but quickly developed bumps because of shoddy work by the contracting company, would not be repaired either.

Borissov used the opportunity to defend his track record as mayor of Sofia and attack the Cabinet of Socialist Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev. "I want you to take me, with experts, to show me a single stretch done by Stanishev and if it is straighter than Tsarigradsko Chaussee, then we will talk," he told reporters, as quoted by Dnevnik. "I have done more boulevards than the Socialists did highways".

Borissov's GERB party is currently leading in public opinion polls ahead of next year's scheduled parliamentary elections and Borissov himself sees himself as the main rival to Stanishevfor the Prime Minister job after the elections.