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Sara Petrosyan

A Mayoral Kingdom is Established in Garni

Garni is in turmoil once again - the village hasn't been supplied with irrigation water yet, though the temperature this summer is higher than the average, and drought is a greater threat. The people in charge of irrigation system explain to angry residents that the water pumps are malfunctioning and that they are trying to collect the money needed to repair them.

But this is the same explanation that the water-deprived residents (some 600 farms are affected by the malfunctioning pumps) hear from the Garni community administration every year. And every year, irrigation begins with the collection of money to repair the pump engines. Then the residents are charged for irrigation for the entire year. Everywhere else, the irrigation season starts on April 1 st . But this rule, like so many others, does not apply in Garni. In Garni, the water pumps don't go into operation until mid-June, and are only used three times before they end up out of order until September. Then the following year it again turns out that the system is a couple of million dollars in debt and thus unable to repair the pumps.

For more than a decade now, the drinking water system has been in bad shape as well.

Following repeated complaints from residents and a number of publications in the press two years ago, the Yerevan Water-Sewage Company took charge of the water supply of Garni. The population was provided with water for four hours in the morning time and for two hours in the evenings. But this only lasted for a short time. Then Garni Mayor Ashot Vardanyan promised the Water-Sewage Company that he would regulate the drinking water problems, starting with cutting off illegal water pipelines. But the mayor failed to fulfill his promise and the village has once again been left without drinking water.

The funny part of this is that Garni supplies Yerevan and a significant part of the Ararat province with drinking water. Deputy Head of the State Committee on the Water Industry Rudik Ghukasyan said, pointing at the water map of Armenia, "Show me just one other place where there is more water than in Garni. The residents are to blame if they can't make the mayor's office fulfill its duties."

When we asked the mayor why he didn't submit a project proposal to various donor-organizations, he said that the Kotayk governor didn't allow this and that there was no money in the budget.

In 2006, the state has provided the village of Garni with 43 million drams in subsidies. "What problems can 43 million drams solve in a village with a population of 8,000?" I asked the chairman of the Union of Community Financiers, Vahan Movsisyan. "It can solve serious problems," he said. "The club, the kindergarten, the library should be functioning, the streets should be cleaned, some money should be used for capital investments, etc."

"And if we add tax revenues and payments for irrigation?"

"It's quite a large amount," Movsisyan said.

Mayor Ashot Vardanyan has included the resolution of the problems Movsisyan noted in the 2004-2006 three-year plan for the socio-economic development of Garni.

The Mayor has planned:

• to improve the drinking water supply situation,

• to secure the uninterrupted supply of irrigation water,

• to organize refuse collection in the community and to ensure its cleanness,

• to repair inter-community roads and streets.

The first six months of 2006 have passed, but none of these plans have gone into effect.

Garni has no proper sewage system. In the 1970s a sewer was constructed in the center of the village. Since then, the community has expanded and dozens of new houses have been built, but the sewer has remained the same. And both the more than 50-year-old drinking water network and the sewer are corroding. The situation got even worse when a tannery was established in the village center. Chemical waste from the tannery periodically blocks the sewers and the wastewater flows through the village streets spreading an unbearable stench (See also: A toxic tannery in Garni).

Garni is a tourist area; even if the mayor's office doesn't regard this as important, it should at least implement its own project to keep the village "developed and clean". But there are piles of garbage even along the central streets of the village and the road leading to the four-thousand-year-old pagan temple, and the streets are in terrible disrepair.

The generation that has grown up in Garni in the last 17 years seems never to have heard of refuse collection; they dump their garbage right into the Garni Gorge. And the mayor has just one answer to this-there is no money in the budget.

But how much would it take to put up street signs or post the annual community budget on the wall of the mayor's office? At least half of the buildings in the 17-kilometer-long village have no addresses, but since the village has grown significantly over the last 20 years, the residents don't know each other as they do in small villages. A letter may travel a circuitous route from the post office, its contents discussed in a few families, before it reaches its intended reader.

Budget revenues in Garni, as in other villages, originate from land tax, property tax, and land lease. Even the village of Vardenis, which is populated by refugees, manages to collect 100% of its taxes. But Garni, which has just 3,000 hectares of agricultural land, is constantly in arrears on budgetary spending. The budget implementation in 2004 was 62.1%. In 2004-2005 114.7 hectares of agricultural land and 2.7 hectares of industrial land was leased, but only 630,000 drams was collected in payments, in other words, approximately 5,366 drams from one hectare of land. Why can't the mayor collect the payments due? For one simple reason - most of the land is leased by the mayor himself and his entourage.

And two years ago, Vardanyan presented a proposal to the local council to buy a Gazel minibus to take schoolchildren (who walk over 3 kilometers to school) to school. But the vehicle services only the mayor himself. For the mayor's cellular phone, the local administration pays somewhere between 700,000 and one million drams a year.

With all this, there is no notice post at the mayor's office informing the villagers who visit of what, after all, the staff is concerned with and what they can expect from the mayor's office. As for Ashot Vardanyan, he never responds to letters or petitions, in principle.

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