The three former mayors of Yerevan were talking about the past of Armenia’s capital city and expressing their opinions about future development at the “Hayeli” club on Wednesday. Albert Bazeyan, Vahagn Khachatryan and Suren Abrahamyan were all of the opinion that the Yerevan municipality doesn’t work well, although it can.
The three former mayors of Yerevan don’t understand the idea of dividing Yerevan into parts because they are certain that the current structure is working.
“It is ridiculous to divide the city and has to do with a lot of expenses,” said S. Abrahamyan.
V. Khachatryan brought up the example of Leon, where the municipality decided to unite the already divided city because “the center and outskirts had turned into different environments, the center was perfectly clean and delincuencies were on the rise in the outskirts.”
Bazeyan mentioned that none of the problems of Yerevan, including garbage disposal, transportation, street trade, apartments, greenery, the snow in the winter and the holes on the asphalt after the snow melts, continue to be main issues of concern. S. Abrahamyan said that “the rights and responsibilities of the mayor have mixed up so much” that it’s hard to apply standards for evaluating the work of the mayor. “People are disappointed in the city and have conformed,” he added.
According to the speakers, the municipality’s form of governance and the electoral order of the mayor must change in order to free Armenian citizens of the consumer psychology.
“We have appointed mayors and elected district heads. This means that the district heads are not subject to the mayor and work independently,” said V. Khachatryan.
“The elected mayor may become a problem for the authorities,” says S. Abrahamyan.
According to Bazeyan, having a free and independent elected mayor doesn’t mean that the mayor can be a counterpart to the president of Armenia. It’s just that only the elected mayor can pay the price for his errors and decisions. The speakers don’t deny that many errors have been made.
“We weren’t able to resist urbanization,” said S. Abrahamyan.
“The current Armenian authorities are a little smarter than us because they know where the money is,” said V. Khachatryan, referring to the well-known sale of the “alluring center”. When we say Yerevan we first of all mean the extremely large construction and the pollution in the city. Then we move on to the buildings, the situation of the yards and apartment building entrances filled with garbage, the elevators, the dysfunctioning of water and gas pipelines. It’s nowhere near being perfect. Although it seems as though those issues were to be solved because we, the citizens, pay for the municipality to take care of those issues. V. Khachatryan is certain that those problems had to be solved a long time ago because the freezing of water pipes could be explained by the lack of electricity fifteen years ago. Now there is electricity, but the water pipelines continue to freeze. The three former mayors were talking very emotionally about urbanization and cleanness.
The “alluring center” has been sold a long time ago and there is a split in the psychology of the people living in the outskirts and heart of the city.
“Yerevan is currently turning into hell and is threatened by the warming effect,” says S. Abrahamyan and citizens of the heart of Yerevan may soon be the target of aggression of the people living in the outskirts.
“Just like in Paris, the people from the outskirts will attack the citizens living in central Yerevan and will start burning cars and buses.” There was a time when the municipality was thinking about constructing a street parallel to Baghramian street where flow of traffic stops from time to time due to traffic jams, but according to Khachatryan, that is no longer possible because there are villas on that street now.
“We are all former mayors, but we want to do everything we can to clean the dirt of the country,” said S. Abrahamyan.
“It is still possible to live in Yerevan,” added V. Khachatryan, even taking into consideration the fact that the capital city of Armenia occupies the 21st and highest place in the list of the world’s most expensive cities.
Honest and smart administrators are needed in order to "clean the country of dirt”. Those attributes just don’t come with the elected mayor; the mayor either has them or doesn’t. Whether elected or appointed, the mayor may not have the right to consider Yerevan his own and go along with principles just to get on the good side of the authorities; he is simply administering the capital city and may his conscience remind him of how of principle he must be. Now it turns out that mainly the “former” mayors are talking about reasonable and principle approaches because they accept different rules when it comes time to occupy a position. Each administer inherits from the one before and passes the tangle of daily problems on to the other. Meanwhile, prices for land are increasing in Yerevan and it is becoming more and more alluring. What we need are rules and regulations and clean air. During that time, of course, Yerevan is getting tired of us.