By Vestnik Kavkaza
One year is left before the Olympic Games in Sochi. According to Anatoly Pakhomov, Mayor of the city, all the sports and Olympic facilities and infrastructure have been built already.
By the 2000's in Sochi a lot of long-standing problems had accumulated. There were environmental issues, especially landfill, which had to be rehabilitated and cleaned, the storage and disposal of waste in the city. Next was the issue of traffic jams, because a road that was built under Stalin remained the same - now three roads parallel to the old system are being built. A railway has been built. There also were energy problems - two CHPs were built - in Sochi, and it generates 160 MW, and in Adler, which generates 360 MW. However, according to Pakhomov, not all the problems are solved: “There is a need to build another CHP - the money is allocated, the tenders have been held, and now we are working on massive reconstruction of the power grid in the city. There are generation capacities, and the high-voltage line through which electricity is supplied to the city is new and modern. But the distribution network of high-voltage lines and substations is cable groups, which were laid in the 1960s. They, of course, are obsolete and should be changed. We have to change 800 km of cable groups. This means that, if two cables are laid, you have to dig up 400 km, put a new cable and replace 413 transformers. This is a tremendous amount of work, of course, but this is a guaranteed power supply that has never existed in Sochi.”
Remembering the history of the resort, Pakhomov complains: “A resort was created for workers under Stalin. Spa resorts and Stalinist architecture appeared, and today it is the decoration of the city. But it was built on a swamp. A magnificent resort was created, but what's next? Appearance of the city - there is the magnificent nature, the beauty, the only subtropical region in Russia, the main Russian resort. But the appearance could always be better... The city has a program on restoring the architectural appearance of private houses. Let's just say there are 7000 houses, which, in our view, should be renovated; there should be the top of the roof of the color of wood, I once mentioned red roofs and was criticized by everyone for it 4 years ago, when they said: "The mayor of Sochi has a problem - he settled on the 16th floor and saw that the roofs are ugly, because he decided that they should all be of the same color" Today, if you fly to Sochi, you will see that we have approached European standards. But we still have half of these private houses to be put in order this year. This is the renovation, as I said, of facades, roofs, yards and fences.
We provide 1 billion in the city budget for the improvement of the city, for pedestrian zones and green zones. 2 billion rubles is to put in order and repair the entire road network. This is a large amount of money, but it should be done, because there was massive construction, and more than 7,000 units of construction vehicles, of course, damaged the roads.”
Pakhomov thinks that the Olympics is a mega-project, which is the property of the whole of Russia: “In fact, this project is supervised personally by the President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin. Naturally, the work on this project is implemented by all ministries, all government departments, and by the city and the region. This is our victory. It is our competitive international resort number one, the one that we wanted. The city of Sochi - it's not a city of Sochi's residents. This is a city of all Russians. This is our city, because all the Russian people created it - both for themselves and for those guests who will come to us and, in general, understand that Russia also has such resorts."
