The residents of Goris pay 200 drams for job references to Goris Tnt. (CJSC), an enterprise that used to be the town’s center for utility services. Seyran Gevorgyan, head of the company, said that some of the Goris residents do not pay the fee. He said that they spare some of the poorer residents from paying.

Gevorgyan said that in a small town all of the residents know each other and they collect fees from only those who are able to pay. Given this, they can’t forecast which part of their company’s budget may cover these payments. The basic part of the company’s annual budget (24 million drams) is allocated by the regional administration. Goris Tnt. gets the rest of the financial sources from 100 drams charged from each resident for municipal sanitation, street cleaning and lighting works, as well as from a six dram tariff that the residents of apartment buildings pay per 1 sq. meter. In recent years the company has also implemented a campaign to eliminate the number of stray animals in the city. 1 million drams are allocated for this from the company’s budget. According to Seyran Gevorgyan, the monthly payments for collecting garbage amount to 50%, while only 3% of the residents pay for their privatized apartments. He said there is no way to forecast which percentage of the apartment residents will make the payments. “If we take into account the fact that about 15% of the 24 million drams of state budget allocations are envisaged for salaries, for paying the state taxes, for collecting garbage, for the ecology tax, as well as about 1.2 million drams spent for roof repairing every year, we can see the financial condition the company is in to carry out proper garbage collecting and city cleaning works,” Gevorgyan said. He added that they carry out all the above mentioned functions at a satisfactory level even though their company doesn’t have adequate equipment.  In the course of the last thirty years the city sanitation service got one new garbage truck.

The other four are constantly being repaired. Gevorgyan also emphasized that one of their key problems is the lack of employees. Many of the town’s unemployed feel reluctant to join the city sanitation works.

“There are people who ask for reference letters for their family members to get unemployment benefits but when we offer them a job they refuse or sometimes even get offended,” Gevorgyan said, adding that at present the company has over 20 vacancies.

“I can’t understand people who can’t earn their daily bread but refuse garbage collection jobs. They don’t want to be drivers of the garbage trucks when the monthly salary of drivers may amount to 100,000 drams,” he stated. He also expressed concern about the fact that the residents do not help to keep the city clean.

“Though there are garbage cans in a number of streets and the garbage trucks run in the city every week, most of the residents just dump the garbage on the sidewalks,” he pointed out. Gevorgyan said that they remove about 20 tons of garbage every day from Goris and that his company can hardly cover all the expense of the work. “Thus, every person or company that carries our construction works should remove the construction waste themselves,” Gevorgyan said.