Rēzekne municipality Ozolaine civil parish Losu village has homes from which there is no way out. From the big road to resident Svetlana's parents' home, there is a 230-meter road that was cleared last winter but not this year.
This spring Rēzekne municipality council decided, on the basis of the new local government law which does not oblige the local government to provide paid services for the use of tractor machinery, that in future the owners of roads leading to private houses will not be cleaned as a paid service by the local government. Residents must buy the service from commercial firms.
“There's nothing around. There are two other families - also pensioners. The first mini-shop is 10 kilometers away. The city with services is 20 kilometers away,“ Svetlana described the situation. “When calling a commercial company there was an answer that it costs €80 an hour. To come, to clean those 230 meters, and to leave costs about 200 euros a time.“
For Svetlana's parents, the pension is €400 each. But snow should have been cleaned at least three times so far.
The Social Service and Education Board of Rēzekne municipality has identified target groups for which the local government clears the road, but Svetlana's parents do not belong to these groups.
The local government shall clean the busy private roads only in crises, if an emergency or rescue service call is necessary. Paradoxicallly, the road that is cleared by the municipality leads to a graveyard.
“It's very nicely cleaned to the graves where nobody's there, everybody's dead. Nobody goes there to visit their dead relatives in winter, but the road is squeaky clean. But there's a living family over there, and there's another single woman - everything is surrounded by snow mountains,“ Svetlana said.
Meanwhile, the Latvian Association of Local Governments (LPS) explained that the supervising authorities strictly observe that the municipality's State target grant is used only for cleaning the roads, streets, and transit routes owned by it.
“There is no way to maintain driveways, because there are several cases when municipalities have had their money withheld, it is where municipalities risk,” said Aino Salmiņš, LPS advisor on national economy issues. "The other thing is that there have been competition neutrality enforcers for several years too. Both the State Audit Office and the Competition Council have regulated the procurements. Unfortunately, respect for competitive neutrality creates additional bureaucratic obstacles.”
Procurements for the cleaning of driveways are not carried out because it requires a lot of money to administer, and it is impossible to predict how snowy the winter will be and what the need for this service will be.
There is no unified position on how the local authorities deal with opportunities to help their people.
Salmiņš said that local governments should look for individual solutions. He said residents in a similar situation should contact the local authority to find an opportunity to help them clear the roads.
“I think that in that dialogue with the parish authorities, those problems will be solved. I do not believe there are deaf, blind people in parish administrations,“ Salmiņš said.
