Overhaul of houses in St. Petersburg style: a gold mine for the ones, and a heavy cross for the others

Why is it so "Novye Izvestia".

Lyudmila Butuzova

According to the supervisory authorities, the national average collection rate is 92%. Every year, Russians transfer up to 150 billion rubles for overhaul. However, only 67% of the funds collected in 2018 were spent on the completion of the overhaul (this is only 3% of the apartment buildings included in the regional programs).

The Ministry of Construction of the Russian Federation agreed with the conclusions of the prosecutor's office and the joint venture that the built-up FKR system requires a radical restructuring. As a result of the checks, 62 criminal cases were initiated. Most of them ended as usual - personnel changes and purely symbolic punishments. Moreover, two years after the "perestroika", the number of worn-out and dilapidated housing in the country has grown, and the scheme for withdrawing money collected by the population for overhaul has improved.

- If earlier the funds were "imperceptibly" plucked out of the common piggy bank for their own needs, but now, for example, in St. Petersburg, the scheme has been debugged so that it directly yells "Steal me!" - Natalia Pshenichnaya, a leading expert on housing policy of the interregional Anti-Corruption Center, shared with NI. - We talked about it for a long time, but now the Chamber of Control and Accounts of St. Petersburg has come to the conclusion that the regional operator of the FCR has turned from a repair organization into a tax collector and an uncontrolled manager of residents' funds.

The sensational report of the St. Petersburg PCB came out a few days ago. It covers three years of the life of a regional operator amid an ongoing struggle with a dilapidated fund. The local program is calculated until 2039 and includes more than 22 thousand buildings built from 1728 to 2014. A significant part of them are historical buildings that require renovation of particular complexity at high prices. ... The total cost of the program is over 700 billion rubles.

The question is where to get the money? If until 2012 there were various schemes of double or triple co-financing, when the lion's share of expenses fell on the federal budget, then with the adoption of amendments to the Housing Code, the honorary right to repair their houses was assigned to tenants, and the state is gradually reducing its burdensome overhaul obligations to zero. Moreover, even in such complex cities in terms of overhaul as Petersburg.

Aleksey Kovalev, a deputy of the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly, is sure that the poor condition of houses in the Northern capital is a headache not only and not so much for St. Petersburg residents. “This is not the fault of the citizens who carelessly maintained their homes. Even in the USSR, the maintenance of buildings was not given due attention, and therefore they fell into such disrepair. It is unacceptable to impose on the Petersburgers this underrepair, which has accumulated over decades, ”the parliamentarian believes.

Representatives of Smolny and the regional operator reject this thesis: “Residents should consider their property not only an apartment, but also an apartment building as a whole. They own everything: the roof, basements, elevators, stucco moldings on the ceiling and old vintage in the front door. And you have to pay for it. "

The Accounts Chamber in its review indicates that Smolny found an original answer to the question "where to get the money?" “To reduce the budgetary burden, contributions from the population are increasing”, - the report says. “In two years, they have tripled, to 12 rubles per square meter”. And by no means always, according to the JV auditors, growth is economically justified and fair in relation to residents.

Strictly speaking, the St. Petersburg overhaul program has two financial sources - budget subsidies and contributions from citizens. The ultimate goal of officials is to keep treasury participation to a minimum. In 2018-2020, the need for capital repairs, according to the housing committee, was 32 billion rubles. The plan called for a gradual reduction in the share of the budget from 60% to 23%. For three years, subsidies to the fund were supposed to amount to 13 billion, the remaining almost 19 billion had to be collected from the owners. And this happened by tightening the screws from the side of Smolny and twisting the arms from the side of the FKR, which imposed wild fines and lawsuits on the defaulters. As a result, in 2019, Smolny allocated 4.3 billion rubles for overhaul, and 4.7 billion rubles were collected from residents. In 2020, the proportion changed: only 3 billion rubles went from the city treasury to repair houses, while the rent from the owners was already 10 billion rubles.

At the same time, the money collected from the owners of the premises is constantly stored on the fund's account. By the beginning of 2021, the amount of unspent funds reached 5.2 billion rubles. In 2014-2019, the audit led by auditor Yuri Shutov found out, the fund received almost half a billion rubles in income in the form of interest accrued by the bank for using the money. Of these, only 40 million were allocated to finance the overhaul - 8.2%. The rest of the income was distributed for purposes that did not comply with housing legislation. In 2018, for example, from the money earned by the fund, the management assigned itself and its employees 28 million rubles in the form of bonuses.

FKR paid special attention to additional remuneration, it follows from the report. For three years, employees were paid 220 million rubles in excess of their salary for achieving “key performance indicators” in the absence of criteria for assessing this very efficiency.

The productivity tuning fork for auditors was the previous director Denis Shaburov, who worked from 2015 to June 2020. For success - they were assessed by the higher housing committee and the apparatus of the profile vice-governor - the head was paid from the city budget a monthly incentive in the amount of 80% of the official salary. In the last year before Shaburov left, this encouragement was cut off eight times - apparently, it dawned on Smolny that the Fund was not fulfilling the tasks assigned to it, the KSP concludes.

In addition, the Foundation lives entirely at someone else's expense. Employing 450 people, he consumes 800 million rubles a year from the budget for his own needs. The Foundation is located in a business center on Tobolskaya Street. It is also rented for budget money - about 200 million over three years, six million a month. Comparing the prices for commercial real estate in the city, KSP came to the conclusion that the Fund is overpaying at least 30%, with the full connivance of Smolny as the founder of this gluttonous office.

But in the hunt for debt, the fund has surpassed itself. In the reporting documentation, the auditors found mutually exclusive information on the contributions of citizens. One report suggests that the organization, as a tax collector, is overfulfilling. Other reports indicate that debts doubled in a couple of years and reached 2.7 billion. The transfer of arrows to defaulters allowed the fund to "knock out" additional funding for the collection work. Judging by the official figures, online consultations of the fund call center are in great demand in St. Petersburg. The budget pays for 760 thousand minutes per year for conversations with the owners of the premises. In fact, it is a debt notification auto-dialer. A minute of such a service costs five and a half rubles.

In 2019, Fontanka spokeabout the judicial hyperactivity of the Capital Repair Fund. He applied en masse for the issuance of court orders against debtors. The effectiveness of this work turned out to be deeply negative. In 2018-2020, the fund spent 40 million rubles on payment of state fees and legal services. According to the decisions of the courts, 8.7% of the invested money was recovered - 3.5 million. From a budgetary point of view, it would be better if the FCR did nothing. Another exquisite work included printing and mailing 334 thousand claims, payment for the services of payment agents - State Unitary Enterprise “VTsKP” and “Petroelektrosbyt”. The money for these expenses was transferred from the funds allocated for the overhaul itself.

“Despite the significant amount of funding, the overhaul program does not give real results”, - the PSC auditors conclude. And the reason is clearly not that the owners of the premises are accumulating debts. The Chamber of Control and Accounts believes that the fund in the reporting period of the audit for 2018, 2019 and nine months of 2020 carried out overhaul work in the absence of expertise on the reliability of the estimated cost for a total of 5.9 billion rubles. The auditors estimate budget losses at 2.7 billion.

There are more than 400 companies in the register of qualified contractors that have received the right to participate in the overhaul, but in the vast majority of cases there is no competition in electronic auctions. The share of contracts concluded at the maximum price with a single auction participant reaches 85% per year.

As a marker of the effectiveness of the fund, the KSP cited the example of non-existent houses. By the end of 2017, at least ten objects, including those that were demolished, were subject to exclusion from the overhaul program. The same houses appeared in the address list in December 2020. During a random check, the PCB found two houses to be resettled on Rabfakovskaya and Zaporozhye streets, on the repair of which the fund spent 38 million rubles for some reason from contributions from citizens and budget subsidies. Another incident happened to one of these buildings: the house on Rabfakovskaya is a student dormitory and is under the operational management of SPbSUE, Rosreestr, Rosgvardia. Nevertheless, the residents of the hostel received contributions in the amount of 844 thousand rubles, however, they managed to rip off only 7 thousand from the students. On the eve of resettlement, the foundation repaired the roof of the house on Zaporizhzhya. According to the assumption of the townspeople, "I really had to pay one of my own..."

In general, according to the Chamber of Control and Accounts of St. Petersburg, the regional capital repair fund committed 113 violations in the amount of 1.3 billion rubles in three years

Comment

Expert of the Interregional Anti-Corruption Center, Candidate of Legal Sciences Natalya Pshenichnaya - "Novye Izvestia":

"The reaction of the Foundation to the PCB report is expected and typical: “the comments were considered, for each of them, well-reasoned objections were presented, we will continue the interaction procedure”.

There is no doubt that everything will remain the same. Because the very system of creation, organization and management of regional funds is vicious and illegal, and all FCRs work not according to the law, but according to the rules that are offered to them.

As there was not, and there are no intelligible explanations why there are now two lines in receipts for housing and communal services - current and major repairs, which practically coincide in amounts. There is no legislative justification why a compulsory contribution for overhaul, falling into the accounts of the FKR, according to its charter, is called a DONATION.

According to the laws of the Russian Federation, a fund is an NGO, I quote: "...a non-profit organization without membership, established by citizens and (or) legal entities on the basis of voluntary property contributions, pursuing social, charitable, cultural, educational or other socially useful goals." FCR - a voluntary non-profit organization? But then explain why defaulters are persecuted by bailiffs, why they are imposed huge fines and late fees, and the foundations do not have agreements with their "donors". But that's not all.

Since the fund has been declared “non-state”, it, like all non-profit organizations, is not subject to the law on public procurement.

What does it mean? Reg-funds conduct tenders for the selection of contractors according to their own rules, guided by their own internal instructions. So, how they look for contractors, what kickbacks they take for profitable objects and opaque estimates, no one knows. The sequence of houses for overhaul in most regions is also very conditional. The survey of the housing stock has practically never been carried out, which means that there is no clear idea of which houses are in dire need of repair, and which ones to save and save for. It is enough for the fund manager to move his fingers a little in order to include one house in the renovation plan immediately, the other later, the third even later, and, accordingly, influence the competition of contractors. The state as specially created for these offices a breeding ground for parasitic existence. But in general, our housing and communal services have always been distinguished by this - ineffective management, existence at the expense of consumers, staff turnover, ineffective management due to the abundance of random people in the industry. In the early 2000s, the problem overripe, they began to look for a way out, the launch of regional capital repair programs seemed like a light at the end of the tunnel. Alas, it turned out to be the same rake, only now the citizens of Russia are attacking them at their own expense.

The initial parameters of this dramatic process for the population were announced in the Duma: over two billion square meters of living space in the country needs overhaul, and a billion needs immediate repairs. Moreover, no inspection of houses for dilapidation and accidents was carried out, all by eye, or rather at random, in order to horrify the country with the scale of the disaster and thereby force the owners to be more compliant. It succeeded in the absence of any legislative base and elementary regulatory documentation. There are no documents, but at the same time there is an indicator of, in fact, administratively established discrimination of citizens: contributions for major repairs must be rented by all homeowners, but only 36.5% of houses are included in regional capital repair programs. And 63.5% of houses, respectively, are not included. That is, tenants "voluntarily" pay for the repair of someone else's property. This imbalance must be eliminated.

Second. Lack of transparency (and, as a consequence, corruption-generating nature) of the work of regional capital repair funds. It is impossible for the payer to know how much money has been collected in a given period. Added to this is the situation related to the overestimation of expenses for the maintenance and salaries of the funds, including their high salaries. Some of the questions would be removed or would not arise at all if each house had its own savings account and could independently dispose of funds for overhaul. But in reality, citizens are not allowed administratively to switch to special accounts, so as not to lose control of their money. Only 1% of property owners nationwide were able to gain control over their funds. In Moscow, for example, about 30 million rubles are collected annually for a 6-storey apartment building. If the residents made repairs themselves, then it would cost many times less and would be many times better. Today, the practice is such that funds contract low-skilled workers for overhaul, who do not always receive wages from their employers and can only harm the house by their actions. Residents as an interested party - an investor and at the same time a consumer of overhaul services - are not invited to discuss the composition, technology of work, prices, quality and quantity of building materials, but are faced with the fact of executing huge estimates, in which, in addition to adding the volume of expensive repair work, they are also laid at inflated prices and building materials, which are also replaced by analogs of inferior quality. And all this grows into millions of money spent by regional funds.

Since 2016, almost all political parties have consistently advocated the re-reform of the overhaul reform - the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, A Just Russia, Yabloko. According to one of the authors of the proposals of State Duma Deputy Sergei Obukhov, while there are loopholes in the legislation in the field of overhaul, the safety of funds is under threat. Many will rise on this topic before the elections. The main thing is to come to real measures - ineffective and corrupt capital repair funds were liquidated, the wages of directors were set at the legislative level, and the compulsory quitrent from the population was canceled. An all-Russian discussion of the results of the work of regional funds and their regulatory support would become a progressive moment. The order in the house must begin with this.