Mayoral and City Council elections in Kyiv may be in the offing. Proof of this is the efforts of the municipal council to demonstrate the transparency of their decision- making process, even in the most sensitive business sectors, such as real estate. The Day received accreditation to cover a session held on Oct. 23 by one of the council’s permanent commissions. The meeting was chaired by the commission’s secretary Oleksandr Lutsky. Seated beside him was Svitlana Makeieva, head of the Kyivrada’s directorate for land relations, urban development, and city planning. During the session it was sometimes difficult to tell who was in charge.
The first item on the agenda was the fees for plots of land leased to the Kyivrada and City State Administration’s municipal business entity known as the Kyiv Investment Agency. Makeieva quickly explained that there was no sense in deliberating this issue because the council has already discussed it twice and adopted a resolution. “When was that?” asked a member of the commission. “I don’t remember when exactly, I’ll tell you in 10 minutes,” Makeieva promised, but didn’t keep her word. Some council members were outraged: “How could this have been done without us?”
“What do you mean? You also deliberated the issue twice, in July, I think,” countered Makeieva and went on to explain that placing this item on the agenda was a mistake. The council members were embarrassed by their memory lapses and unanimously voted to delete the item from the agenda. It is anyone’s guess what lies behind such “small mistakes.”
The next issue was a statement submitted by a concerned citizens’ group (1,075 signatures), demanding the cancellation of a land allocation on Dmytriievska Street in the Shevchenko district. The representatives of the investor and district council were given the floor. They stated that the project had been approved at public hearings (attested by minutes of the meeting and a seal) and by the Urban Planning Council, and accused the owners of 14 unauthorized garages of organizing protests. One council member asked timidly: “What about those 1,075 votes?” No one answered him because none of the protesters were in the room. “Were they even invited?” someone asked Makeieva, who fidgeted and then replied, “They were notified by telephone.”
When a council member proposed to institute written invitations and an appropriate register of such correspondence, she frowned and everyone understood that this will never happen. A female council member, who sympathized with the investors, noted that the absence of the concerned citizens’ group could by no means prevent the commission from writing a letter to the mayor, asking him to grant the residents’ demands as stated during the public hearings. The motion was passed unanimously and the idea expressed by 1,075 individuals was completely ignored.
While the commission was in session, Kyiv’s Deputy Mayor and City Council Secretary Oleksii Dovhy posed for the cameras and spoke into the mikes to demonstrate the transparent nature of land relations. The Day’s reporter turned on his tape recorder at the very moment when the young bureaucrat was discussing the issue of the artists whom the city administration had targeted for eviction from their studios. Dovhy took his time listing all the measures adopted by the city administration to protect artists and booksellers from encroachments on their rented premises. He concluded by announcing that soon there will be a new head of the Podil District State Administration (replacing Romanenko, who made the mistake of demonstrating his dislike of art). Dovhy said he hopes the replacement will have “better morals.”
Who doesn’t want a moral government? In the last few months similar demands have been put to Mayor Leonid Chernovetsky and his council members. The Kyivrada’s session on Oct. 1 was a shock to residents and the city’s political class. As reported by various media, almost all the political parties represented in the Kyivrada have dirtied their hands with corrupt real estate deals. Now they realize they have to clean them. The BYuT is the number-one cleaner, since this political bloc probably got the smallest slice of the pie. Nor are the NU-NS and Party of Regions blocs likely to oppose early municipal elections. The Vitalii Klychko bloc forwarded a letter to the President of Ukraine the day after the fraudulent land sales in the Ukrainian capital, urging him to purge the Our Ukraine faction in the municipal council of individuals who tarnished their reputations on Oct. 1 by stealing 1,000 hectares of Kyiv land and “supporting lobbying decisions that are damaging to the capital city.”
According to Dovhy, this is not damaging but beneficial. Responding to a question put by The Day, he said that, contrary to critics’ allegations, land tenders are underway in Kyiv, and that the municipal budget has received over 1.5 billion hryvnias from land sales in the past 10 months. Meanwhile, the Land Union of Ukraine says that the price of a sotka (0.01 ha) in Kyiv is worth more than 66,000 dollars. In other words, each hectare could have been sold for $6.6 million, and the 1,000 hectares that changed hands gratis on Oct. 1 amounts to $6.6 billion (some sources say up to $10 billion).
According to other data, the pro-mayoral majority in the Kyiv City Council will take the land issue to the vote during its Dec. 28 session.
