Square landfill – Kommersant

The Ministry of Natural Resources of Russia has prepared a draft amendment to the laws on local self-government and on environmental protection, which specifies the distribution of powers to eliminate ownerless landfills between regional and municipal authorities. It is proposed to consider garbage in the amount of at least five cubic meters as a landfill – anything less “may be removed as part of landscaping activities,” the authors of the project say. And in general, it is necessary to distinguish a dump from cigarette butts thrown in the wrong place, the department explains. Municipal authorities warn that the amendments are cosmetic in nature and will not solve the real problem.

The draft law, published on the regulatory disclosure portal, was developed in pursuance of a decision of the Constitutional Court (CC), which in May allowed municipalities not to pay for the cleaning of ownerless landfills on state-owned undelimited land plots, and obliged the legislator to determine the sources of financial support for the powers of municipalities to liquidate garbage. The dispute was initiated by the administrations of Kodinsk (Krasnoyarsk Territory) and the Novosibirsk Region of the Novosibirsk Region, who do not agree that they are obliged to clean up landfills in state-owned territories, although such powers are not supported by appropriate funding.

The government objected to this that it is possible to clean up landfills at the expense of income from land plots, the ownership of which is not demarcated, and fines for negative environmental impacts, 60% of which go to municipal budgets. However, the CC came to the conclusion that such a mechanism cannot be considered effective: it does not allow taking into account the size of the landfill, local budget revenues, the liquidity of the land plot, the presence or absence of the possibility to provide it for use on investment terms, and other factors.

Nevertheless, the authors of the amendments insist that it’s clean not where they clean, but where they don’t litter: municipalities should take measures to prevent the formation of ownerless landfills “as part of maintaining the territories of municipalities in proper sanitary condition,” the Ministry of Natural Resources explains. For this purpose, the draft defines for the first time the concept of “unauthorized waste dump”. As specified in the explanatory note, until now it existed only in the departmental order of Rosprirodnadzor and was used exclusively to assess the effectiveness of the governors and executive authorities of the regions.

Also, municipalities are left with the obligation to clean up landfills in territories where state property is not delimited, if they are within the boundaries of the municipality. Funding for such work should come from fines for violations in the field of environmental protection and payments for claims for damages to the environment.

The changes envisaged by the bill are purely cosmetic in nature and do not bring one step closer to a real solution to the problem, lawyer Olga Bazhenova, who represented the administration of Kodinsk in the Constitutional Court, is convinced. Firstly, she notes, the amendments do not solve the problem of financial provision of municipalities in the exercise of the relevant powers: the sources of financing listed there have previously been fully or partially directed to the local budget, and the project only gives them a targeted focus. In addition, these funds continue to go to the budgets of municipal districts, while the elimination of landfills is entrusted to urban and rural settlements. Secondly, the lawyer notes, the empowerment of municipalities with these powers requires their further specification – such as, for example, the establishment of a procedure for the elimination of landfills, which was unequivocally pointed out by the Constitutional Court. In the draft law, such specification is assigned to the subjects of the Russian Federation, but there is no certainty that they will cope with this task. Moreover, municipalities can be endowed with many powers, primarily of a control nature, exclusively at the federal level, reminds Ms. Bazhenova.

“In fact,” she states, “instead of creating a special mechanism for financing the powers to eliminate unauthorized dumps on state-owned lands and lands where state property is not delimited, the legislator leaves the municipalities with the same amount of financial resources, imposing on them the obligation to eliminate dumps regardless of whether the land plots belong to the state or municipalities. In such a situation, it is not surprising that the legislator has not activated a compensatory mechanism that allows municipalities to recover money from the federation or subjects in case of insufficient funding by them of the authority to eliminate unauthorized dumps, adds Olga Bazhenova.

According to Rosprirodnadzor, by the beginning of 2022, 15.5 thousand unauthorized landfills were discovered in Russia. But, since more new landfills were formed than they had time to liquidate, even with the liquidation of 19 thousand such objects last year, 12.8 thousand of them remained.

Anastasia Kornya