Press Release, 08.02.2018
Yabloko Chair Emilia Slabunova began her visit to Kaliningrad, Russia’s Western region, within the framework of Grigory Yavlinsky presidential campaign.
The two-day visit of Yabloko Chair started with a meeting with truck drivers protesting against the installation of a truck weighing station in the Kaliningrad region. From now on every passing truck should be automatically weighed, and if a maximum permissible weight is exceeded, the driver receives a fine.
“We have recently weighed three vehicles six times, and the error of the scales reached 4 per cent,” trucker drivers complain. “So it turns out that the price of a 160 kg error is half of driver’s working day, plus there is a fine for the organisation.”
According to Emilia Slabunova, 68 per cent of the roads in the Kaliningrad region do not meet the req
uired standards, and such extortions could be avoided in case of redistribution of budget money. “There is a way out of the situation, and it is quite obvious: 1 per cent of the GDP, the funds that are spent on defense and the army, can be redistributed in favour of construction and repair of roads,” the politician noted.
Emilia Slabunova also visited the wheelchair manufacturing plant of Roman Aranin, a Russian inventor who founded a company for production of wheelchairs and other products for people with disabilities. Workers of the enterprise, including employees with disabilities, create unique wheelchairs with caterpillar traverse, floating wheelchairs, platform elevators and wheelchairs that can step up and down the stairs.
Yabloko’s Chairman noted that the living and working conditions of people with disabilities are constantly in the party’s focus of attention, and in November 2017, the Bureau of Yabloko following consultations and meetings with specialists, adopted a statement on the need to create a society of unlimited possibilities and build a socially responsible state.
About 71,500 people with disabilities live in the Kaliningrad region, and 20,500 of them are able-bodied, however, only a quarter of them have such an opportunity, Emilia Slabunova said. “Russia buys about 100,000 electric wheelchairs annually, almost all of them are imported. And here they produce wheelchairs of a new generation. There should be a state programme to provide people with disabilities with such devices,” she stressed.
Emilia Slabunova also visited an enterprise for the production of window constructions and discussed the problems of local entrepreneurs.
At a meeting with residents of Kaliningrad Yabloko Chair discussed the problems of the whole region and ways to solve.
She cited data on the average wage in the region: as of the end of 2017, according to the Federal State Statistics Service, it was 31,166 rubles (approx.. USD 519), 30 per cent less than in the North-West Federal District of Russia, and 20 per cent lower than the average salary in Russia. Kaliningrad is ranked 62nd as of the quality of public services in major cities of Russia.
It is possible to change the situation by choosing the alternative offered by Grigory Yavlinsky in his presidential programme “The Road to the Future”. Its first strategic direction is the fight against poverty. “The government says that we have 14 per cent of the poor, which is 19 million people out of 140 million – one out of seven. But we call the poor those who have income below the subsistence level. But they are not just poor, they are the poorest. Those who have wages below the national average should be called poor,” Slabunova said.
One of the measures to address the problem of poverty should be exemption of those who have income at the level of the subsistence minimum from the income tax.
Another strategic task for Grigory Yavlinsky as Yabloko’s presidential candidate is to change the budget policies, the structure of the redistribution of taxes collected in the regions. “In the Kaliningrad region 72 per cent of taxes go to the federal budget, 8 per cent remain in the urban and rural settlements, 20 per cent in the regional budget. We propose the following: 33 per cent should stay with the local authorities, 33 per cent at the regional level, and 34 per cent at the federal level. Only under such conditions it will be possible to switch on all the mechanisms for creation of a normal business climate on every level,” Emilia Slabunova noted.
The programme of Yabloko’s presidential candidate also assumes absolute budget transparency against the current 20 per cent of its classified articles, and a change in the structure of budget expenditures: reduction of expenditures for military purposes and the law enforcement and redistribution of expenses in favour of education and health care.
Implementation of the program “Land – Houses – Roads” is another strategic task. The programme envisages allocation of plots of land for families to build a house, but the state must at the same time provide the site with all the necessary infrastructure.
“Grigory Yavlinsky knows how to bring the economy and the country out of the crisis, so you have to come and vote for different policies, for the future,” she concluded.