Public Hearings in Tomilino Snowball into Makeshift Protest Rally Outside School
On December 7, public hearings in the village of Tomilino on its incorporation into the Lyubertsy Urban District focused not on the announced topic, but on a confrontation between law enforcement and locals
Zhukovskie Vesti
December 7, 2016
Administrative reform in Moscow Region has come to Zhukovsky’s neighbor the Lyubertsy District, which the governor wants to transform into the Lyubertsy Urban District. The regional government and the governor believe this step will help decrease and optimize expenditures. Opponents argue that centralizing authority will simply leave the rural settlements without people to represent their own interests, which will lead to budget cuts and infrastructure collapse. Many experts argue that administrative reform of this kind is against the law. This, for example, was the conclusion reached by the State Duma’s Committee on Federal Organization and Local Self-Government. A similar stance has been adopted by members of the Presidential Human Rights Council. This, however, has not slowed down the determination of the governor and his team. However, others have not resigned themselves to this approach, and the residents of the village of Tomilino are a striking example.
On November 29, Vadim Lapitsky, head of the Tomilino village administration, resigned, and the independent website vtomilino.ru, which had served as a venue for expressing viewpoints opposed to the regional authorities, was shut down. Grassroots activists believe this was the response of authorities to resistance by locals to their top-down decisions. Indeed, discussion of the planned reforms has been the main topic of conversation recently.
The Tomilino town council decided to hold a referendum in which villagers would vote the reforms up or down, but this was met with objections from the Lyubertsy prosecutor’s office, which claimed that holding a referendum on an issue like this would be illegal. According to the prosecutor’s office, public hearings, which are advisory in nature, were sufficient to resolve the issue. A pressure group collected 2,800 signatures in favor of the referendum, but the authorities simply ignored the petition.
Ultimately, the villagers came to the public hearing, the only official event at which authorities had decided to listen to the voice of the people. However, the police, led by the police chief of Lyubertsy, were waiting for Tomilino residents at Prep School No. 18, where the hearings had been scheduled. The school’s large auditorium was unable to accommodate all comers. (According to the pressure group, around a thousand people came.) People stood in the hallways, and around a hundred people were left outside, since the police had barricaded the door. As a result, the people outside the school held a spontaneous protest rally at which they chanted slogans against unification with Lyubertsy.
Meanwhile, in the auditorium, Vladimir Ruzhitsky, head of the city of Lyubertsy, initially tried to explain the benefits of enlargement to the audience, but in the heat of ensuing discussion he got personal. The locals also expressed their opinions emotionally, without mincing their words. In the end, a detailed discussion proved impossible. The majority told the authorities exactly what they thought, while the authorities demonstrated the were indifferent to these opinions and that public hearings were conducted merely to comply with procedure.
At the moment, the public hearings are continuing in Tomilino. Find out all the latest news at www.vtomilino.ru, the Tomilino group on VK, and the Telegram channel https://telegram.me/vtomilino.
The Russian Reader 