On May 29, the Sofia Municipal Council (SOC) adopted the budget of the Sofia Municipality for 2025. The procedure was delayed due to the late adoption of the state budget for this year.
Sofia's budget amounts to nearly 2.9 billion leva, which is about 400 million leva. more than that for 2024. In the capital, repairs and projects that have already been started will mainly be completed.
The Sofia Municipality announced yesterday that the publication of the public procurement for garbage collection and garbage cleaning in 7 zones in Sofia worth over 500,000 leva is imminent.
The topic of the budget, cleaning, parking and other important projects for Sofia was commented on in an interview for the program “This Morning“ by the mayor of Sofia Vasil Terziev.
Who will clean Sofia?
“After we launch the procurement, we will see who the companies will be. We have made a lot of efforts to have a more open procedure, to reduce the requirements for companies, in order to open it up to more companies to participate in this process“. This is how Terziev answered the question of who will clean the city.
The mayor of Sofia is optimistic that new companies will appear.
He emphasized that the new public procurement for cleaning the city provides for 2 to 10 times higher fines for companies that commit violations.
According to him, and under the current contracts, cleaning companies have often been sanctioned in the last year and a half since he became mayor - the fines are over 4 times higher than in previous periods.
“It became clear that when there is a desire to be controlled and sanctioned, they can improve the quality of the service“, the mayor added.
He defined the battle with unregulated landfills in the city as “uneven“ and stated that it will continue. Terziev specified that it cannot be conducted without the assistance of the Ministry of Environment and Water (MESW). There are over 200 such landfills in the capital, he admitted.
Salaries in public transport
After the 6-day strike that blocked the movement of public transport in Sofia, the government allocated 15 million leva to increase salaries by 300 leva.
„These 15 million leva will not be enough for anything. You cannot look at these things from April to September or until December. When you make a decision that increases the cost of salaries, it has no end, this is not a one-time expense“, commented Vasil Terziev.
He asked Prime Minister Rosen Zhelyazkov whether the government would commit to providing funds for this increase in salaries in Sofia's public transport in the coming years, but the Prime Minister has not made such a commitment.
“These 15 million leva are more of a problem for me than a solution“, added the mayor of Sofia.
According to him, the problem is the lack of reforms and optimization in the companies responsible for the city's surface public transport.
Terziev promised that people who had public transport cards during the 6-day strike would be compensated.