When does this work end?!
Author: Denis Tahiri, Geri Emiri
Mid-February of this year found students at Gustav Mayer School boycotting the learning process and parents in protest. The reason: the transfer of students to other schools, until the reconstruction is completed.
At the entrance of the school, there is a notice board worth about 70 euros.
In the table of works financed by the Municipality of Tirana, the term of the works is set at 6 months, without having a start and end date. After the protest of the parents, the municipality postponed the deadline for the start of the works until the end of the school year.
The case of the Gustav Mayer public school is not the only one.
The Center for Quality Journalism observed the billboards of 8 public works of the Municipality of Tirana, ranging from the requalification of residential blocks, the reconstruction of roads, the construction of underground parking lots, and to the billboards of reconstructions and interventions in schools.
They show that only a part of the criteria defined in the Instruction of February 15, 2001, "On the supervision and approval of construction works" and in Decision number 894 of 14.11.2015, are applied.
Unlike the Municipality, private construction companies put on their work notices the deadline for the completion of the works, with the corresponding date, month and year.
The Center for Journalism found this at 3 construction sites for multi-story buildings near Elbasan Street.
In parallel with the construction of the National Arena stadium , in Italia Square , the Municipality of Tirana is continuing work on the construction of an underground parking lot with a capacity of 200 spaces.
The construction occupies a considerable area and will create two underground parking floors, but the legal criteria such as "Construction area, number of underground floors, as well as the seismic intensity of the construction site" are missing as data in the table of works that the municipality has established at the entrance of the construction site.
For buildings over 8 floors, the data of engineering-seismological studies, obtained from the Institute of Seismology, should be presented as data in the table of works, but in the 3 private constructions of multi-story buildings, the presentation of these data was not found.
The decision to unify the procedures for controlling the territory by the National Inspectorate of Territorial Protection and that of the local unit details the data that must be presented in the works table, such as: construction area, construction intensity, area of the plot or plots affected by the development, road area being built, a telephone number for contact as needed, and other data. These elements are missing from the 8 public works tables of the Municipality of Tirana, observed by the Center for Quality Journalism.
Criteria for job boards
Although the duration of the construction calendar months is written in the public works, no one can know the time when it ends due to the lack of a date for the start and end of the works. Meanwhile, the situation is quite different with private investments.
Public Works Private Works
What can be seen in many of the signs placed at the construction sites by the Municipality of Tirana, is the lack of information about construction permits.
One of the data that the law requires to be placed on the information board is the building permit number, but as can be seen in the photos above, this data is not reflected in any of the City's work.
The Municipality of Tirana refuses to speak
The Inspectorate of Territory Protection in the Municipality of Tirana is responsible for the control of public works that the municipality performs, also controlling the implementation of the criteria for the table of works.
The Albanian Center for Quality Journalism , after conducting field observations, consulting with the law and experts in the field, addressed this Inspectorate with a request for information.
The answer was absent, thus violating the law on the Right to Information of the Public with official documents (law 119/2014). Pursuant to this law, we addressed the Commissioner for the Right to Information, as the law clearly stipulates.
The Commissioner for the Right to Information asked the Municipality to return an answer, but until the moment of publication of this article, no answer was brought from the Municipality of Tirana.
The law requires that there be transparency for the start and end of the works.
Its absence is not only a violation of the law, but also a violation of public trust for investments with public funds.
*Editor: Lutfi Dervishi
** This article was produced as part of the project “Tiranalytics: An assessment of local government public spending in the Municipality of Tirana” supported by LevizAlbania, a project of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation . The opinions and positions expressed in this article do not necessarily represent the opinions and positions of the donor.
