Press Release, 7.12.2020

The Yabloko faction in the Moscow City Duma submitted a package of amendments for the second reading of the Moscow city budget for 2021 and the planning period of 2022-2023. A significant part of the amendments concerns allocation of funds for subsidies to organisations and individual entrepreneurs affected by restrictions due to COVID-19 lockdown. According to Yabloko, Moscow could allocate this money to help businesses to survive if it gave up senseless transport expenses and payment for the Mayor’s Office publicity campaigns.

The second part of the amendments is targeted at provision of assistance to vulnerable categories of citizens. Thus, an additional 5.6 billion roubles can be allocated from the reserve fund for payments to children, whose parents are evading alimony payments.

Yabloko also proposes to allocate 7 billion roubles to creation of gratuitous after-school groups for schoolchildren in Moscow by means of reducing spending on the development of a “unified light-and-colour environment” programme.

Cutting such a budget item as “other programme-oriented areas of government activity” could give additional 10 billion roubles, which could fully compensate for monthly payments to the capital repairs fund for those who have reached the age of 70. Now these people pay 50 per cent of the tariff.

Another amendment increases the standards for deductions from the personal income tax to the budgets of municipal districts. The total amount of contributions to the budgets of municipalities upon the adoption of the amendment will grow almost fivefold: from 3 to 14.8 billion roubles.

Yabloko proposes to allocate 14.1 billion roubles for resettlement of hostels and construction of new housing for their residents. These funds can be found if Moscow does not build residential housing in the sanitary protection zone in Southern Medvedkovo.

Funds to support businesses in a difficult situation can be received by means of abandoning meaningless and harmful transport projects – objects of the street and road networks, metro lines and transport hubs.

Thus, 96.9 billion roubles for aid to businesses could come from rejecting construction of interchanges, chords, belt roads and transformation of streets into highways.

Another 5.9 billion roubles can be obtained if the Moscow government abandons the plans of building the Novatorov – Kommunarka metro line, which will duplicate the Moscow Сentral Circle, but will not have the required number of transfers, which means it will overload the Akademicheskaya metro station.

It is also proposed to abandon the expenditures on building transport hubs, which, contrary to their name, do not solve any transport problems. For these purposes, the Moscow budget has allocated 39 billion roubles.

Another 2.3 billion roubles can be allotted subsidies to businesses, if this money is not spent on publicity campaigns of the Moscow Mayor’s Office.

All these amendments were made by the Yabloko faction. In addition, each of the four members of the faction will submit their own amendments for second reading of the Moscow budget.