The Bulgarian press today pays considerable attention to a controversy related to the status of the program of the previous government for renovation of residential buildings in Bulgaria.
Referring to a statement of caretaker Minister of Regional Development Spas Nikolov, newspaper "Trud" writes that "Money for renovation is not enough." The budget of 1 billion euro under the program was sufficient for just 2022 buildings that are in various stages of renovation, but there are other 2000 that submitted documents for funding and another 2,000 in the process of creating associations. A headline in “Sega” reads that "Money was spent in advance" and in January 2016 the Regional Ministry asked the Bulgarian Bank for Development to suspend new agreements for funding. However, mayors were not informed about this and they continued to sign agreements, believing that there was enough money. On the other hand, the caretaker government found that prices for repairs are unreasonably high. The program started with prices of 150 euro per square meter that were later reduced to 70 euro but this is still high as previous European programs achieved the same result with 50 euro per square meter. In some cases there were inadmissible activities such as landscaping around buildings, new elevators and other improvements that have little to do with the idea of "energy efficiency".
"24 Hours" quotes former Minister of Regional Development Lilyana Pavlova, who said that published information shows the caretaker government taking side in the election campaign and the only true finding was that interest in the program was huge. According to Pavlova, the criticism of the caretaker government actually gives opponents of GERB chances for attacking the most successful policies of the "Borisov 2' Cabinet, which were infrastructure and renovation.
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