Yerevan Mayor's Pre-Election Promises Have Failed So Far: Ani Khachatryan

The pre-election promises of Yerevan Mayor Hayk Marutyan have failed so far. Ani Khachatryan, a member of the Yerevan City Council from the 'Luys' faction, expressed this opinion in an interview with Tert.am.

“During these 10 months, neither the garbage collection problem nor the transportation issue has been resolved, and no promises regarding other issues have been fulfilled. We have nothing regarding any of the 7 points of the pre-election promises,” she noted.

When asked whether 10 months is enough to fulfill these promises, Khachatryan responded that at least 10 months is not too little to solve the garbage collection issue. “Ten months was enough to be in the final phase of solving the transportation issue, and it was enough for the 20 elevators that were said to need replacing to have been replaced already, with a new 20 awaiting replacement. A lot could have been done in those 10 months, yet all we did was send a few criminal cases to the police, make some staff changes, and nothing else,” she added.

Khachatryan believes that the garbage collection issue could be resolved if a second operator is involved, which cannot currently be the municipality. “A second operator needs to be involved by terminating one of the contracts with ‘Sanitek’. As of now, there is nothing like that. During the last session, the deputy mayor also said that perhaps none of the contracts with ‘Sanitek’ will be dissolved. The municipality cannot be the second operator until one of the contracts with ‘Sanitek’ is terminated. Now the municipality claims to be the second operator. How can you be a second operator? No, this issue won't be resolved this way,” the council member stressed.

She also expressed her opinion that the municipality is worried that if one of the contracts with ‘Sanitek’ is terminated, the company may refuse to fulfill any contracts at all. The member of the ‘Luys’ faction pointed out that the entire budget of the Yerevan Municipality is allocated to garbage collection, which is not being conducted properly. “In this session, we allocated an additional 1.7 billion drams for garbage collection. Prior to that, we cut from the budgets of landscaping and kindergartens and gave that money to garbage collection. In other words, the entire budget of Yerevan goes to garbage collection, which is why nothing has been accomplished. They say drip irrigation; show us one place where there is drip irrigation. There is none. And the entire city is burning. When we said that the budget for landscaping should not be cut, we were saying it for all of this,” she emphasized.

Addressing the issue of cafés demolished by the municipality, Khachatryan noted that by demolishing the two cafés next to the opera house, the municipality did not achieve the green area that was mentioned. “A park should have been created there; landscaping, large trees, but there won’t be any trees planted there because there is a parking lot underneath. In short, another populist step. They also say that another café has been demolished in the Circular Park, but that café had long been under the municipality’s jurisdiction, meaning we have demolished our own property, which we could have done whenever we wanted,” she concluded.