The Constitutional Court will identify the person responsible for the liquidation of unauthorized dumps

The Constitutional Court (CC) of the Russian Federation will sort out the procedure for the liquidation of unauthorized dumps. The decision will be made on May 30. The administration of the city of Kodinsk, Kezhemsky district, Krasnoyarsk Territory, and the administration of the Novosibirsk district of the region of the same name, appealed to the highest court: they consider it unfair that they are obliged to clean up landfills in state-owned territories without providing funding.

The regional operator for the treatment of municipal solid waste (MSW), Avtotransportnoe predpriyatie LLC from Kodinsk, cleared a site located on the territory of an urban settlement from garbage, and demanded 324,000 rubles for this. from the municipality. The courts agreed that the obligation to eliminate the unauthorized dump lies with the local administration, which is authorized by the legislator to dispose of state lands.

The administration of the Novosibirsk region did not take proper measures to clean up the territory littered as a result of the life of the village of Borovoye (there is a resort area on the banks of the Ob reservoir). At the request of the prosecutor, the courts ordered the local administration to liquidate an unauthorized dump on a site related to agricultural land.

Representatives of the municipalities believe that the disputed provisions do not comply with Art. 10, 12, 17 (part 3), 19, 36 (part 3), 130, 132 and 133 of the Constitution. They do not agree that they are under an obligation to eliminate unauthorized dumps of solid waste and garbage on land plots that are not in their ownership. At the same time, the state, as noted in the complaints, does not transfer to them the material or financial resources necessary for this, arbitrarily mixing the concepts of “owner of a land plot” and “a person authorized to dispose of a land plot”.

In accordance with the Land Code, if the person who caused this damage is not known, the owner of the land should eliminate the damage, said Svetlana Razvorotneva, deputy chairman of the Duma Committee on Construction and Housing and Utilities. Thus, the municipalities are indeed subject to this rule. “The fact that they have no money to fulfill their powers has been said for a long time,” Razvorotneva said. According to her, when the reform on the circulation of MSW began, the ideologists of the reform said that there would be no one’s land left and the subjects would be divided into zones, and already within this zone the regional operator would be responsible for all landfills.

Vedomosti sent a request to the government.

The problem of delimitation of powers of municipalities and regional authorities in solving problems with unauthorized landfills is a regular one, explained Ilya Zharsky, managing partner of the Veta expert group. He recalled that in 2015 the Constitutional Court had already considered a similar case with ownerless garbage, it was about landfills in the forests. Then the administration of Severouralsk, Sverdlovsk region, considered that local governments could not be charged with the obligation to eliminate unauthorized dumps on the lands of the forest fund, since they are federally owned.

The Constitutional Court ruled that the courts should not oblige the municipal authorities to eliminate unauthorized dumps in the forests, if this is not funded from the regional budget.

Municipalities are responsible for their territories and, of course, are obliged to ensure their cleanliness, says the head of the Russian environmental operator Rashid Ismailov. According to him, the principle is that if you can’t keep things in order, compensate the costs to the regional operator, who found its resources and spent money on eliminating your landfill – as prescribed by law. “This is true. The rest of the discussion is due to the unwillingness to pay, in fact, the intention to dilute one’s responsibility,” Ismailov concluded.

The position of the Constitutional Court on this issue in the future may lead to the need to reallocate budgetary funds, says Anastasia Kucherena, managing partner of Key Consulting Group. She recalled that paragraph 2 of Article 132 of the Constitution states that local self-government bodies may be vested with separate powers by federal or regional law, provided that the necessary material and financial resources are transferred to them.