The government declares a state of crisis in Sofia over the household waste collection. The decision was announced by Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev after the government's weekly meeting on Thursday.

A crisis HQ will be set up and a representative of the Town Hall will be invited to participate, Stanishev said.

The crisis HQ will have authority to hire machines and people to clean the capital.

The landfill in Souhodol is declared a site of national importance, without change of ownership, Stanishev said. Sofia City Hall does not have a clear plan for solving the problem for a new landfill and for development of a waste processing plant, he added. Stanishev noted that City Hall annually collects 140 million leva from waste fees while 80 million leva are given for cleaning. The city's contracts with the eight companies for cleaning the city will not be terminated if they work, but if they don't they will be mobilized, noted.

The money for the activities put forward by the crisis HQ will be taken from the state budget reserve, the HQ head Todor Modev.

The waste crisis in the capital flared up last month, when one of Sofia's waste collection companies, Novera, stopped trucking away the garbage from several boroughs over a money row with City Hall. The Mayor's Office responded by terminating Novera's concession contract and hiring others to do the job. In the meantime, dumpsters started to overflow and stayed like this for a while as the new waste collection companies, in the Mayor's words, needed time to get their bearings.

The state of crisis was proposed in a report prepared by the ministries of environment, of health and of regional development which were ordered by the Prime Minister to look into the health and environment hazards from the disturbed waste collection.

The report by the three ministries said that the situation with the disrupted waste collection in Sofia is critical because it affects a significant part of Bulgaria's population - some 2 million, out of a population of around 8 million. Based on that, the government said in a press release Wednesday that the situation is without precedent in the EU, due to which it has to assume the responsibility and take urgent measures to ensure waste management in line with EU directives.

As the government made public its intentions to interfere, Sofia Mayor Boiko Borissov cut short an official visit to Moscow and was back to Sofia on Thursday morning.

In a special declaration on the matter, GERB, which has Borissov as its informal leader, said that there is no crisis in Sofia and that it is Bulgaria which "is in a crisis it has been unable to overcome". "Through its mandate, the government has done nothing to help Sofia resolve its problems and started talking of Sofianites' problems only at the end of its mandate and only to heighten tension over an issue which had practically been resolved," GERB says.

It further accuses the government of announcing its plans for a state of crisis in Sofia without even discussing it with the Town Hall. That was a publicity stunt and not a sign of good intentions, the message says.

According to GERB, the government has had many reasons to declare state of crisis before: when Russian gas supplies were disrupted earlier this year, when Sofia was almost blown up by

explosion of old ammunition in the nearby Chelopechene military facility and when the world is rocked by a financial and economic crisis. "Instead of taking measures to offset the impact of the crisis and update the national budget, the government goes into partisan campaign action paid by taxpayers' money," GERB say.

According to Borissov, not only is there no danger of a crisis in Sofia, but the situation improve daily. "When the Council of |Ministers wants to help us financially we are quite agreed, for we anyway give a lot of money to the state treasury and deserve to live better," he commented.

In the opinion of Sofia's Mayor, the reduction of the quantity of waste disposed at the Souhodol landfill is due to the fact that the waste separation installation was put into operation. He added that now some 30 per cent is separated while the capacity is 50 per cent.

Source: BTA