Search for alternatives to fee-based parking near social facilities in Kazan

“They use citizens as a source of wealth”

The Constitutional Council of Tatarstan has undertaken to check the resolution of the Executive Committee of Kazan for compliance with the basic law at the request of two citizens. The applicants are convinced that by expanding the network of paid parking lots, officials are violating the rights of citizens.

“By and large, for a city like Kazan, the practice of creating paid parking is, in my opinion, exclusively a source of budget replenishment,” one of the people who addressed the issue, Kazan lawyer Teymuraz Mindzhia told Realnoe Vremya before the meeting.

He explained the same thing, only in more detail, to members of the Constitutional Council. Minjia emphasized that city residents pay taxes — they essentially support officials and “consider power as a way or means of ensuring comfortable living in this city”:

“In our republic, in our country as a whole, there are national riches that should be beneficial, but we would not want citizens to become sources of wealth for the state! In our country, in the republic, the interests of the citizen have been declared a priority.”

The lawyer also asked a question that Kazan car owners have been asking for a long time: why does the executive committee not create new parking lots, not invest in their improvement, or invest symbolically — put markings on the asphalt and puts up the appropriate road signs, but uses what was built by its predecessors to collect fees:

Only 10 free of charge out of almost 8,000 places

Members of the Constitutional Council of the Republic of Tatarstan were very interested in two aspects — the lack of free parking (there is no documentary evidence of their existence in the form of a publicly available register) and the play on words, with the help of which the Executive Committee of Kazan evades responsibility for the actual failure to comply with the requirement of the law of the Republic of Tatarstan on the regulation of certain issues in the field of traffic organisation... The document directly prohibits the placement of paid parking on adjacent territories of buildings of educational, medical facilities, state authorities and local governments, organisations providing state and municipal services.

When asked by the Constitutional Council what the ratio of paid and free parking is in Kazan, neither the representative of the executive committee nor the representative of the Organiser of City Parking Space could answer. And during the discussion it turned out that there is no register of free municipal parking — they, or rather, the only one — 10 parking spaces on Safiullina Street, are listed in the register of paid parking. And it is free for a reason — the representative of the executive committee let it slip, answering the question of member of the Constitutional Council Elmira Mustafina, that “there is no point in making it fee-based.” At the same time, there are already 7,829 paid parking spaces in Kazan today.

In addition, it turned out that the Kazan Executive Committee interprets the phrase “adjacent territory” exclusively as “the territory directly next to the building itself and nothing more.” Considering that school and hospital buildings are usually fenced for safety reasons, paid municipal parking lots in Kazan are located right next to their fences. For example, near the huge RKB hospital on Orenburgsky Trakt highway there is a similarly huge fee-based parking area, and there are practically no free lots. Therefore, citizens who come here for examination, treatment or to care for relatives, often from distant regions of the republic, from settlements where there is no bus service, spend huge amounts of money on parking.

Later, Realnoe Vremya asked why disabled people are punished for violating paid parking rules, but no one is held accountable for the lack of free spaces for people with disabilities. And how does this look from the point of view of compliance with the rights of disabled people in Kazan?

The representative of the Executive Committee said that administrative commissions “try not to fine disabled people the first time.”

But there was no answer — the official said: “All requests are submitted in written form. Write, they will explain everything to you.”

“Since when do the servants of the people tell the owners what to do?”

The Constitutional Council also drew attention to the fact that municipal parking in Kazan is being introduced under the pretext of freeing the streets from parked cars, but cars parked for a fee no longer interfere with transport. Thus, council member Roman Gafarov asked why, instead of paid parking, they don't simply put up a “No Parking” sign to free up the roadway? There was no answer.

However, during the meeting, a representative of the Executive Committee reported that some paid parking in front of government agencies and social facilities is organised at the request of citizens. This is precisely why, he pointed out, they made the parking in front of the Tatar military registration and enlistment office paid — the motorists themselves, they say, asked for it.

The lawyer added that the conclusions of the Constitutional Council of the Republic of Tatarstan are not mandatory for officials to implement, and is now preparing an appeal to the court:

“I say: ‘Lads, you are the government, so make it so that I feel comfortable. I should not feel like a source of enrichment! My complaint to the city authorities is that they do nothing in the interests of the city residents, using the uncertainty, ambiguity and possibility of double interpretation of the law.’ They tell me: ‘If you don’t like it, use public transport.’ And since when do the servants of the people tell the owners what transport to use?”