The Mykolaiv Regional Council has asked the Cabinet of Ministers to allocate funds for the repair of the R-55 road in the Yelanets community
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- Julia LukyanenkoReporter
The Regional Council will ask the Cabinet of Ministers to allocate funds for the repair of the R-55 road in the Yelanets community. Photo: Suspilne. MykolaivThe Mykolaiv Regional Council has appealed to the Cabinet of Ministers to include funding in next year’s state budget for the major repair of the R-55 «Odesa — Voznesensk — Novyi Buh» road and to ensure it remains passable this year. This road also runs through the Yelanets community, where it is in poor condition. However, councillors did not support the proposal for local communities to co-fund the repairs.
The regional council adopted the decision at its meeting on 10 September, according to NikVesti.
Councillor Tetiana Demchenko (elected from the «Opposition Party — For Life» party) made three appeals during the session. The regional council did not include two of them for consideration. In the first, the councillor emphasised the need to build the «Sofiivka — Voznesensk — Yelanets» water pipeline. According to Tetiana Demchenko, the Yelanets Town Council has still not adopted a resolution at a session regarding the development of design and technical documentation for the water pipeline through Yelanets. Consequently, the matter remains unresolved.
In addition, the councillor proposed postponing the Ministry of Health’s order introducing new standards for the hospitalisation of patients.
«Given that our region has been under heightened security threats for a long time, our territories, unfortunately, are systematically subjected to drone missile attacks, which affects the ability of healthcare facilities to operate stably,» said Tetiana Demchenko.
Ultimately, the regional council supported the councillor’s request to appeal to the Cabinet of Ministers regarding the allocation of funds for repairs and to ensure access to the R-55 road in the Voznesensk district, which now includes the Yelanets community.
Tetiana Demchenko, a councillor on the Mykolaiv Regional Council. Photo: NikVesti archiveOne councillor abstained from the vote, but the resolution was passed by 36 votes. However, the councillor noted that she also had something else in mind: that local communities should contribute to the funding of the repairs. According to her, they have budget surpluses but are not allocating funds for road repairs.
«I propose that in the second point, where you mentioned ensuring proper maintenance and keeping the R-55 road open to traffic, we should allocate funds not only from the state budget to ensure the road remains open, but also to take steps, ultimately, to ensure that funds from local budgets are utilised, which is not prohibited by law. It is not prohibited by law for all village councils whose territories border the R-55 road to join forces and allocate funds after all. All of them have exceeded their targets based on the results for the first eight months. It is therefore very regrettable that the local authorities are unwilling to acknowledge the problem that ambulances cannot get through, that, unfortunately, children struggle to get to school, and that people cannot reach their destinations,» said Tetiana Demchenko.
She proposed returning to this issue at a meeting of the relevant committee. However, her proposal was not taken into account. The Chair of the Regional Council, Anton Tabunschyk (elected from the «Servant of the People» party), said that at the start of the meeting she had not mentioned funding from local budgets in her request.
«Moreover, we cannot simply order other local authorities to implement certain decisions. We do indeed have relevant legislation which does not prohibit this, but local authorities must decide for themselves,» said Anton Tabunschyk, Chair of the Regional Council.
As a reminder, work on the construction of a water main to the village of Yelanets may resume in the Mykolaiv region . The state has already allocated over 237 million hryvnias for the construction of the main water pipeline; however, in order to supply water directly to the residents of Yelanets, the community must prepare design and cost estimate documentation and set aside approximately 1.5 million hryvnias for this purpose. However, the village council has not yet considered the issue of allocating these funds.
