Petar Dikov, Chief Architect of Sofia Municipality:

Construction is the only activity that creates material basis for the future

  Arch. Dikov, you participated in the seminar organized by the BCC Regional Office –Sofia jointly with the MRDPW, MEW, regional governors of the Southwestern Region and representatives of municipalities, dedicated to the problems of EU funds absorption and ways to solve them. What has to change in the coming months so that more EU funds enter the country? I want to start by saying that the Chamber invited very important participants in the process of EU funds absorption – state, municipalities and builders. During this and next year we have a vital task - to prepare our projects for the next programming period. Unfortunately, not everybody understands it and works hard enough on it. If we fail to achieve our aim, I’m afraid that we will repeat the mistakes of the current plan period, which could not be called very successful. I am a representative of the municipal administration and as such I think that local authorities face a very important task – to provide funding and to select projects to be allocated and prepared by 2013 as technical assignment. They should be well prepared to succeed. The correct groups of projects should be selected that without problems to receive funding. Already in 2005 I sent to the newly appointed Minister of Regional Development a report in which I wrote that if our country wants 2.6 billion euro from Europe for local projects and absorb it we should allocate in advance 5% of their value for design. We failed to do so. Even then statistics showed that best performers in the pre-accession period and subsequently of the first group of new EU member states absorb 80-90% of the funds. I think the structure of European funding will change. My prediction is that there will be three main directions in which we should make preliminary projects – ecology, energy efficiency and the case with the Roma population. It is very likely some people to refer with reservations to the third direction but I think it will be supported only if we are ready to solve the problem.