Moskovsky Komsomolets: “The baby boom creates problems”
How Moscow authorities will address the shortage of kindergarten openings.
During their recent meeting, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov discussed a wide range of issues relating to the life of the city. The shortage of openings at Moscow kindergartens was high on the agenda.
The number of children in preschool in Moscow reached almost a third of a million last year. But kindergarten space is woefully inadequate, and today there are 52 places in childcare per one hundred preschool kids.
Last year, the mayor told the prime minister, 116,000 babies were born in Moscow. What does Luzhkov want Putin to do to help solve the problem of at kindergartens? Nothing except push to settle accounts with those government and commercial structures which have taken over former kindergarten buildings.
"I would like to ask you for help," Luzhkov said during the meeting. "The older kindergarten buildings should be given back to the public under Law 122."
Putin did not object and recalled that in the wild 1990s many kindergartens were converted to other purposes. The prime minister was using a euphemism because in practice during the 1990s Moscow kindergarten buildings were simply taken because they were so poorly protected. It was not until 2004 that the federal authorities passed Law 122 ordering the owners of former kindergartens to return them to Moscow's education system.
However, Vladimir Silkin, the head of the Moscow Property Department, said recently that "the process of transferring the kindergartens to the city is not proceeding fast enough, mainly because the industrial federal bodies, the business and the institutions are resisting."
Base on his information, since Law 122 was adopted, only 105 buildings have been returned, and most of them belong to the City's Treasury. Forty federally owned buildings and only eight privately owned buildings have been returned. More than a hundred kindergartens continue to be federal or private property and the Moscow authorities feel that it would be hard for them to repossess them without the prime minister's intervention.
In the meantime, Moscow is implementing a crash programme to build new kindergartens: before the crisis it built as many as a hundred new facilities every year. The rate slowed when the crisis hit, and in 2010, 45 new kindergartens for 7210 children are to be opened. Another 214 are at the design and construction stage and will be opened over the next two years. In addition, next year city authorities hope to recover more than fifty kindergartens from their current owners. Most of them are federal property.
The mayor explained to Putin that "last year we had to concentrate the city's resources on supporting pensioners, providing social assistance, and we built fewer kindergartens. Now we are restoring that potential and I think that we will solve this task by the end of 2012 and perhaps earlier ... The number of births is increasing year in and year out. Yes, we have fewer problems than other regions, but if there is a waiting list, many other problems could ensue."
"Yuri Mikhailovich (Luzhkov), where it depends on the federal authorities and on Rosimushchestvo, we will help you solve the problem," the prime minister promised.
Alexander Sorokin
