Press Release, 29.12.2020

Photo: Lev Shlosberg, MP of the Pskov Regional Assembly from Yabloko, member of the conciliatory commission on the draft regional budget from the Yabloko faction, Deputy Chairman of the Committee on Legislation and Local Self-Government of the Pskov Regional Assembly of Deputies

 Deputies of the regional parliament adopted the budget of the Pskov region for 2021 in three readings. In the third and final reading, the bill was supported by a pro-government majority of 33 deputies (the United Russia, and A Just Russia factions). The leaders of the regional branches of Yabloko, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and LDPR condemned the colonial budgetary policy of the federal centre and refused to support the bill.

Before the vote on the regional budget for 2021, parliamentarians from both the ruling party and the opposition expressed their views. The former insisted that it is necessary to work with the existing budget and be responsible for it, the latter drew attention to the impossibility of covering the needs of the region and its residents at the expense of the funds envisaged in the draft budget.

Lev Shlosberg, deputy of the Pskov Regional Assembly from Yabloko, noted that every resident of the region was engaged in replenishing the regional budget as a taxpayer, and the responsibility of each deputy was to assess the draft budget from a public political position.

“According to a general estimate, the Pskov region annually lacks about 20 billion roubles to meet basic needs. This is half of the current revenues of the regional budget. Take any municipal budget. There is annually chronic budgetary insufficiency. We need to talk about these problems. These are political problems. This missing money include salaries of people, support of budget-financed organisations, the budget-financed part of healthcare, culture, education, housing and utilities services, roads, economic support. We must understand that the basic macro-budgetary problems have not been resolved to date. It is impossible to hide these problems,” Shlosberg said.

He also stressed that the actual spending on healthcare in the Pskov region should be increased threefold, but this money was not available either through the Compulsory Medical Insurance Federal Fund or the regional budget.

“We have presented our 18 amendments. The administration disagreed with the sources. This is their right. But we insist on the essence of these amendments,” the leader of the Pskov Yabloko noted.

The conciliatory commission, which consisted of five deputies of the Pskov Regional Assembly and five senior officials of the regional administration, worked for ten days on the draft regional budget for the second reading and considered many initiatives, including 18 amendments and 25 proposals that were submitted to the regional parliament by deputies from Yabloko Arthur Gaiduk and Lev Shlosberg.

As a result, eight out of 18 proposals of the Yabloko faction will be fully implemented, and another eights will be partially realised.

It should be noted that Yabloko MPs Lev Shlosberg and Artur Gaiduk proposed to redistribute about 880 million roubles in the budget of the Pskov region and introduced 18 amendments to the Regional Legislative Assembly, which can be conditionally divided into four blocks: preservation of regional additional payments to doctors dealing with coronavirus for 2021 (647,127 mln roubles); maintaining the expenditure for provision of free medicines for those categories of citizens who are entitled to it at the level of 2020 (143 mln roubles), a 7% increase in the wages fund and the material expenses fund of all medical organisations in the region (78,541 mln roubles) and ensuring fire safety in the Pskov perinatal centre (10,900 roubles).

At the end of the session, Lev Shlosberg commented on the parliamentarians’ vote on the budget for the coming year and the differences that arose:

“The budget is the quintessence of all policies. The budget is the taxpayer’s funds that have become the law. A deputy’s position on the budget is an assessment of the entire state policy. What the funds are spent on, how the priorities are set, where there is enough money and where there is not, who is limited and in what. The key problems of the regional budget have not been solved for years: overwhelming public debt, commercial loans with very high interest rate, inflated revenues from taxes, unrealisable agreements with the Ministry of Finance, reduction of the network of social organisations, cuts in local government spending, stagnation of utilities, and ineffective budget investments.

All this is a subject for assessment for a deputy and the position of the deputy when voting on the budget. In this vote, we represent the position of our voters – all those who consider the resources and capabilities of the budget of the Pskov region insufficient, and the budgetary policy unsatisfactory. One cannot advocates a budget made of debt and poverty, even if the crumbs of this pie go to people. One cannot support what is abnormal and give people the impression that such a budget is a norm,” Lev Shlosberg stressed.