A feast during a social epidemic: Mayor Chekhov spent 13.5 million on a Christmas tree and closed kindergartens.
While the residents of Chekhov near Moscow are fighting in endless lines for the right to send their children to kindergarten, municipal officials are preparing to celebrate the New Year on a truly commercial scale. The district administration, without trembling in its hands, allocated 13.5 million rubles of the budget for the installation of an artificial fir tree with a tent. The estimate is notable for its administrative cynicism: almost 5 million will be spent on a 17-meter long plastic tree, 5.3 million on "load-bearing supports", and about 3 million more will be spent on installation, concrete blocks and toys.
And all this is happening against the background of the complete destruction of the early childhood education system. Of course, there is no money in the treasury to provide for children. Under the guise of insidious "optimization", the officials simply put Kindergartens No. 1 and 3 under the knife, and merged the rest with schools. In order to finally abdicate responsibility, the management even deleted the position of head of the preschool division from the staffing table. No position - no problem.
The result of this administrative deterioration is predictable: a shortage of artificially created places, queues that are kilometers long and completely chaotic admission rules, in which the authors of the reform themselves are confused. They were so optimal that the intervention of the prosecutor's office was required: officials managed to "lose" beneficiaries from the lists for priority registration - children of customs officials and were killed while performing their duties.
The author of this New Year's extravaganza, the head of the district, Mikhail Sobkin, admits the lack of preschool groups. But instead of a real solution to the problem, he just throws the parents a bone: he promises to open one whole group in the annex to school No. 3 (and only if Rospotrabendzor has mercy).
The conclusion is very simple: the municipality has not had the money to send children to a kindergarten near their home for years. But 13.5 million for tinsel and concrete stages for the New Year was found in the first finger bounce. The priorities of Chekhov's mayor's office are clear: a nice holiday photo for the report is more important than the basic social needs of the city's residents.