Should HCSes be afraid of anything?

Winter is far away, but preparation of housing and communal services of the country is at its height. What differs 2007 year from previous years (in fact now we have a separate Ministry of housing and communal services), Oleksandr BILYANSKYI, deputy minister on the questions of housing and communal services tells:

– Having refused from cross subsidizing, a different system is needed to be introduced. What will it be like?

– There is the program of reformation ratified as the law of 2004 year. Presently we are improving it taking into account the experience of implementation during the last two and a half years. First, the rules of financing of economic programs by the state are changing. Secondly, cities have to bring credit mechanisms into action. Banks do not credit communal industry in our country. Beginning with the next year the state will be ready to cover a part of body for enterprises or a part of percents of the credit taken under the concrete program. Economic efficiency and decreasing expenses of communal enterprise has to be a condition for it.

This, however, will not help to decrease tariffs, because they do not cover considerable part of charges today. Experience of Polish, who have been inculcating new technologies for already over 15 years, testifies: on condition of growth of price on gas for the population, decreasing of tariffs is practically impossible. Say, Warsaw reduced consumption of electric power by boiler-houses by 18 times, gas – by three times. Polish specialists are convinced: if there were not new technologies, a budget wouldn’t have enough money to give back to Russia for gas and the country could simply froze.

One shouldn’t hope that tariffs will be reduced. And it is needed to work so that they did not grow. We should reach the economy grounded level and then due to introduction of energy preserving technologies and change of form of management (transmissions in a concession to more effective manager of enormous unprofitable enterprises of water-pump and heating systems) work. So we will be able to stabilize a situation. And a lot of time is not needed for this purpose: 5–6 years. And then we will see a quite different communal service, if we talk about water and heat.

The most important task in relation to maintenance of dwelling is to increase the number of associations of joint owners of houses and extend their rights. The state has passed the law about privatization of dwelling, without understanding to the end what it is done for. We have a paradoxical situation: almost 90 percent of apartments are privatized, and houses do not have real owners. Everyone is the owner of his apartment, and the owner of a house is local administration, although maximum 10 percent of apartments belong to it. It is an absurd situation which is present nowhere in the world. If apartments are privatized, an association of joint owners of house is created, and its proper maintenance is a head ache of dwellers, and not of state office. There is a market: water is bought in one place, in a different place heat is bought, and someone takes out garbage on competition bases. Task of ministry is to create conditions for the creation of the real market in the communal services. When they are created, we’ll see a result immediately. Competition is a decreasing of price, fight for quality, for the user of services. What HCS is presently fighting for its user? Answer: what it should fight for, it will go nowhere.