The Legislative Assembly of St. Petersburg adopted a law on the dissolution of the councils of deputies of two municipal districts

The Legislative Assembly of St. Petersburg on Wednesday, for the first time in its history, adopted a law on the dissolution of the councils of deputies of two municipal districts (MD) – Smolninskoye and Ligovka-Yamskaya. Back in 2022, the Smolninsky District Court recognized the deputies of both municipalities as inactive, and the municipalities’ attempts to challenge this decision remained fruitless. Last year, St. Petersburg Governor Alexander Beglov introduced bills to dissolve councils into the city parliament. The deputies themselves consider their “inaction” to be a consequence of a conflict with the heads of districts.

In September 2022, the Smolninsky District Court of St. Petersburg admitted illegal inaction of the council of municipal municipality “Smolninskoe” for more than three months – from December 24, 2020 to March 24, 2021. And the second reason for dissolution was the failure to comply with the decisions of the city court: the council did not publish on its official resources messages about court decisions on a number of administrative cases, as it was prescribed.

The same court in October 2022 declared the inaction of deputies of the Ligovka-Yamskaya municipal municipality illegal in the period from November 12, 2021 to February 17, 2022. During this period, the ex-head of the Moscow Region Vadim Voytanovsky and the deputies did not hold a single authorized meeting of the council in the building allocated to him. Mr. Voytanovsky himself in 2023 through the court deprived powers of the head of the district due to an error in the income declaration.

The deputies were “inactive,” according to some of them, due to conflicts with the heads of municipal districts, which remained the same from previous convocations.

In the 2019 elections to the Smolninskoe municipal organization, the majority of mandates (12 out of 20) were received by representatives of the opposition, primarily from the Yabloko party. But this was not enough to resolve important issues: for example, at least 14 votes are needed to approve the budget and elect a new head. Therefore, the deputy of the previous convocation, United Russia member Grigory Rankov (ER) remained the head of the Moscow Region.

Opposition deputies met separately, but such meetings are considered unauthorized. “The fact that deputies came to the porch, to the hall, and so on, is not a meeting. It is not only the Yabloko members who are to blame; the alleged activists and those comrades from the headquarters of the extremist Navalny are also to blame (the network of headquarters is recognized as an extremist organization and is banned in the Russian Federation.— “Kommersant”) we came,” said Mr. Rankov after the first reading of the bill.

Deputies of the Municipal Municipality “Ligovka-Yamskaya” claim that the meetings were not convened by either the ex-head Vadim Voytanovsky or the current acting head Sergei Ilyin. The municipal deputies gathered independently – for example, on the porch of the council building – but the court declared all such meetings illegitimate. Mr. Voitanovsky, in turn, blamed the deputies “elected on Navalny’s list,” who, according to him, ignored the meetings he convened.

In the first reading, the parliament considered the issue of dissolution in December 2023. Then, in the “inaction” of the municipal deputies of the Smolninskoe municipal district, city deputies vinyl “Yabloko” and “Navalnists”.

The Yabloko faction opposed the dissolution, noting that such decisions clearly demonstrate “government interference” in the work of municipal councils.

Ended this almost two-year story at the legislative assembly meeting on March 20. The bills were adopted as a whole, bypassing the second reading due to the lack of amendments: dissolution council of municipal municipality “Smolninskoe” supported by 39 deputies, Council of “Ligovka-Yamskaya” — 38. In both cases, three votes were cast against. Two of them belonged to Yabloko members: the leader of the faction, Alexander Shishlov, and his deputy, Boris Vishnevsky.

The approved document will now be sent to the governor for signature and will come into force ten days after its official publication. The dissolution will become a precedent for the political history of St. Petersburg, so how exactly it will take place is still difficult for the municipal deputies themselves to answer.

The head of the Smolninskoye municipal organization, Grigory Rankov, is confident that after the dissolution of the council, he will not lose the position of head of the municipal organization. “According to the law on local self-government, the powers of the head terminate when a newly elected person takes office. Nothing will change in the work: before, deputies were not actually observed, but now this is accepted legally,” he explained.

“I believe that the deputies of the legislative assembly took part in creating a very dangerous precedent for the dispersal of a representative body of power. This will come back to haunt the entire system of power,” says Dmitry Baltrukov (“Yabloko”), deputy of the Smolninskoe municipal district. According to him, he and his colleagues are now assessing the prospects of challenging the decision to dissolve. Acting head of the Moscow Region Sergei Ilyin did not answer Kommersant’s call.

For residents, according to Ligovka-Yamskaya deputy Mikhail Shabalkin, nothing will change after the dissolution. “Meetings have not been held and will not be held, decisions have not been made and will not be made,” he explains. “The last official meeting took place almost three years ago, then Vadim Voitanovsky began to interfere with their holding. There was hope for Sergei Ilyin, but he also decided not to hold meetings.”

Mikhail Shabalkin also notes that after dissolution, due to inaction, deputies will not be able to nominate their candidacies in the next elections to the same council.

“Actually, this is why they disbanded us, so that we would not interfere with the next elections,” the Mundip believes. Although, as Mikhail Shabalkin believes, he can go to court and prove that he is not guilty of not holding meetings, and then participation in new elections will become possible.

Let us note that the Council of Deputies of the Liteiny Okrug municipality is now in the process of dissolution, whose inaction for three months was recognized by the Dzerzhinsky District Court in April 2023. An appeal was filed against this decision in the city court, but, according to deputy Sergei Troshin (Yabloko), the process of challenging it never began. “The case got bogged down in the city court at the appeal stage. That is, the decision of the district court did not come into force. There are six months left before the municipal elections, I think that there will be no dissolution,” suggests Mr. Troshin.

By law, new councils must be elected within six months of the dissolution of the old ones. But the Smolninskoye and Ligovka-Yamskaya municipalities are confident that there will be no early elections and they will be held on a single voting day in September 2024.

Nadezhda Yarmula, St. Petersburg