"That would be good. In many countries, members of parliament form special committees that monitor, for example, the activities of central banks, and give current issues in society special attention," said the Prime Minister in an interview on Latvian Television's "Rīta Panorāma" (Morning Panorama) program, evaluating the plan to create a separate Saeima committee regarding "Rail Baltica".
As previously reported, a temporary special Saeima commission has already been probing the troubled progress of Rail Baltica for several months and just released its interim report.
Siliņa emphasized that it is the parliament that has the final say, including on budget expenditures. The Prime Minister would like clarity from the Ministry of Transport on the future direction of the "Rail Baltica" project.
"I want clarity. A year ago, I asked [the Minister of Transport] to come to the government at least with a different management model, because it is clear that the existing management model has exhausted itself. There are several companies that have many employees, but they do everything on a self-managed basis, which is not acceptable," said Siliņa.
The Prime Minister expressed hopes that the Ministry of Transport would have come to the government much earlier with a proposal for a different management model.
However, viewers may have been perplexed by the Prime Minister's manner of talking as if the Transport Ministry was a remote and rarely-seen body rather that one of the ministries sitting at her own cabinet table.
Pressed on this perception by LTV's presenters and asked if she might get more personally involved in pushing progress on Rail Baltica, Siliņa responded with a laugh: "What else do they want – for me to review the engineer's plans? [..] I will hardly be the one who redesigns the railway tracks, but I am ready to discuss it."
"We need clarity that what we build is understandable and also that the maintenance costs will not be such that they require too many financial resources. It's clear that we all want this fast train," said Siliņa, adding that the project has already been under way for ten years and care should be taken that the technology currently being used isn't outdated ten years into the future. "Of course I'm not an engineer, but I've been thinking about this," Siliņa said.
As reported October 29, the Transport Ministry published a tentative plan to address the plain fact that there does not appear to be enough money available to pay for a project whose estiated costs have at least tripled. But the plan prompts as many questions as it provides answers, particularly regarding when Latvia will be able to connect the sections of rail being constructed in Lithuania and Estonia.
Without such connections, the fundamental purpose of the whole project – a fast European-gauge connection all the way across the Baltic states and on to Poland – would fail to be met and would likely to prompt exasperation among Latvia's neighbors.
