site.btaNew Regional Development Minister Attributes Road Network Disrepair to Years of No Maintenance

The disrepair of Bulgarian roads is due to the absence of maintenance contracts over the last three years, the caretaker Minister of Regional Development and Public Works, Violeta Koritarova, said on bTV on Sunday evening.

Koritarova said: "I have decided responsibly and consciously to resume the suspended procedures which were going on under my predecessor, for contracts of current maintenance." She and the leadership of the Road Infrastructure Agency (RIA) have agreed to pick up where her predecessor Andrei Tsekov left off. They will make sure that everything goes by the rules, with utmost transparency, to avoid any doubt about the choice of contractors in the respective regions.

By the middle of May, the RIA should be ready with a national plan for current maintenance and overhaul of roads across Bulgaria, the minister said. Maintenance contracts have already been signed for the western regions of Sofia, Kyustendil and Pernik and for Smolyan in the south. The procedure is underway for the remaining 24 regions.

Discussing the Hemus Motorway in Northern Bulgaria, Koritarova said that when she took office in early April, she was surprised to learn that construction work, which was supposed to be suspended, was still going on under contracts concluded through controversial in-house procedures, and the prices of the contracts were adjusted for inflation. One of the new Hemus sections will be completed by the end of 2024, and other sections will be built by the end of 2026, she added.

The RIA has launched a procedure for the design of the last and hardest-to-build part of the Struma Motorway (which, when completed, will run most of the way from Sofia to the border with Greece). The plan is that this last remaining part of the road will go around the Kresna Gorge, not through it.

"I had the RIA chief replaced after I read the audit report commissioned by the then minister Andrei Tsekov, which reveals irregularities committed by Yasen Yordanov," the new minister explained. The report has been approved by the Public Financial Inspection Agency and will be referred to the competent authorities.

An overhaul of Danube Bridge between Ruse in Bulgaria and Giurgiu in Romania will begin late in the summer. It will be the first overhaul of the facility since it was built in 1954. The technical design for the BGN 45 million project is ready. A construction permit is to be issued, Koritarova said.

A report is yet to be released on the causes for an April 28 collapse of a supporting wall along the Struma Motorway. Koritarova said the collapse came as a result of years of no maintenance of the national road network.