The government approved the rules for the allocation of subsidies for treatment facilities
Within the framework of the Federal Project “Water of Russia” for the construction and reconstruction of structures for cleaning municipal wastewater, 70 billion rubles will be sent to the government, describing the rules for the allocation of subsidies to the regions for these purposes. The “point” investments of the government in the construction of treatment facilities in the conditions of the tough budget are designed to remove the most acute problems of the water utilities accumulated over 15 years of underfunding the industry – those that the growth of housing and communal services tariffs will not allow to solve in the next three years.
The government published Resolutionwhich makes changes to the state program “Providing affordable and comfortable housing and utilities of citizens of the Russian Federation”. She was complemented by the rules for subsidizing measures for the construction and reconstruction of water treatment facilities in the framework of the Federal Project “Water of Russia” (operating from January 1, 2025, is part of the national project “Ecological well -being”). The state support will be provided for the construction and reconstruction of treatment facilities located in strongholds. In these purposes, in the next five years, it is planned to send 70 billion rubles.
The subsidies will be able to count on objects that have passed the selection of applications to the Ministry of Natural Resources for a number of criteria.
- In particular, the project should refer to objects of the first category of environmental impact and be commissioned until December 31, 2014.
- In addition, it must have a comprehensive environmental permit, and the project should be completed until December 1, 2030.
- Among the criteria are the effectiveness of the project and the dynamics of changes in the constituent entities of the Russian Federation – participants in the “incident” (as model meetings are called in the White House by solving specific problems) No. 55 “treatment facilities”.
- Another important condition – in the region, measures for the construction and reconstruction of treatment facilities at the expense of regional and extrabudgetary funds should be carried out in parallel.
As the profile deputy prime minister Dmitry Patrushev emphasized at a government meeting, where the decision was discussed, expenses control will be strict, and “the object will be recognized as the completed object only after receipt of the regulations of wastewater from Rosprirodnadzor”.
It should be noted that the FP “Water of Russia”, as well as the “recovery of the Volga” before it is projects designed to solve the federal center by at least the most acute problems accumulated in previous periods. If the Volga project was supposed to slow down the approach of a river flowing through half of the industrial regions of Russia, to the stage of the environmental disaster, which has been accumulated since the Soviet era, then the FP « Water of Russia » is designed to remove the problems accumulated already in recent history. The fact is that since the 2010s, in social reasons, the Kremlin has insisted on limiting the growth of housing and communal services tariffs. At the same time, in the common pool of “housing and communal services tariffs”, heat and energy suppliers as monopolists, dependent on fuel prices, used more freedom in the “disinsection” tariff solutions, and the general growth index below inflation was achieved by a limitation of increasing the tariffs of water utilities (as a rule, the municipal ones did not allow the budgets themselves to invest in treatment facilities). The accumulated non -investment and forced the government to agree to an advantageous inflation increase in prices for housing services in the next three years (see “Kommersant” dated September 30, 2024), and the solution to the most acute problems in this area, which does not cover the growth of tariff revenue, is included in the federal project, allocating 70 billion rubles for these purposes.
At the same time, these measures will not allow to close all the problem areas of the industry.
The number of projects that can apply for financing the state will include a total of 220 objects, Kommersant was told in the Russian Association of Water supply and drainage.
Therefore, the coverage of the new Fedroekt will be narrow: “This is less than 20% of the cities of the country, and on average one treatment of the first category, depending on the power, can cost 5-7 billion rubles. At the same time, the economy of the water utilities is negative, they are not profitable (especially in small cities). ”
It is also problematic to finance the construction of treatment facilities at the expense of tariff sources, the director of the Institute of Natural Monopolies of the Higher School of Economics, Ilya Dolmatov, indicates: “For the modernization of communal infrastructure in Russia, 4.5 trillion rubles are required, and for this, sources are not traced for this.” However, the control over the use of profit from the growth of tariffs will be toughened (See “Kommersant” from March 11).
