On May 2, deputy of the Moscow City Duma Yevgeny Stupin held a meeting with residents of Severodvinsk who are protesting against building up the Central City Park with high-rise blocks. He supported the activists and said that "the project should have been scrapped"; he also submitted a deputy inquiry to the governor of the region. Local activist Sergei Ilyukhin posted a video from the meeting on vk.com.
Yevgeny Stupin came to a place where the construction of high-rise blocks was planned. The developer, Akvilon-Invest, had surrounded it with a metal fence with posters "Recreation Park" and "Kvartal-100".
"We are being cheated here. We see that it says, ‘Recreation Park’, but what recreation park? Everyone sees that there will be a high-rise block here. This is a lie. This is a lie for those who are not too deeply immersed in the problem, and, accordingly, this is how the developer is trying to outsmart all of us, although we can see that there are studs behind the fence. There was nothing like this six months ago here," the deputy said at the meeting with residents.
According to Stupin, this happens because not enough people are involved in the fight against the development. He supported the residents of Severodvinsk and said that "the project should be scrapped."
"Taking into account that residents voted on social networks, the absolute majority is against these houses, the absolute majority is for a real park, rather than for a lawn that they [the developer, the authorities] want to make. Therefore, the government must scrap the project," Stupin said.
The deputy reported in social networks that he had previously submitted a deputy inquiry to Alexander Tsybulsky, the governor of Arkhangelsk Oblast.
"I have already submitted an inquiry about whether the load on kindergartens, heating, and water supply systems of new homes has been figured out in advance. The deputy governor answered that children would be distributed to operating kindergartens, where there were already queues. There are no estimates on water supply at all. Nobody knows whether the system will withstand a sharp increase in load," he said on Instagram.
Stupin added he would submit additional deputy inquiries.
Yevgeny Stupin comes from Severodvinsk. He has been a member of the Moscow City Duma from the Communist Party faction since September 2019.
In March 2020, the authorities of Arkhangelsk Oblast gave the Central City Park in Severodvinsk to the Akvilon-Invest Company for development without the consent of the residents. The developer plans to build a large elite residential estate, consisting of nine high-rise blocks, there.
Local residents opposed the project. They demanded stopping the development and also offered their own public site improvements' project. To protect the park, the residents appealed to the prosecutor's office, recorded video messages to the governor of the region, invited deputies of the regional Duma and the municipal council of Severodvinsk to discuss the issue, but were ignored.
According to the Forbes Magazine, Chairman of the Arkhangelsk Regional Assembly’s Committee on Economy, Entrepreneurship, and Investment Policy Alexander Frolov is the chairman of the Akvilon-Invest Group’s board of directors. Activists believe that there was a conflict of interest when making the deal.
They began gathering on a site between the Central Department Store and the drama theater every Sunday. The police repeatedly drew up reports on the participants of meetings for violating the mask mandate: in December 2020, activist Sergei Ilyukhin was fined twice for a video message to the governor and the president; and in March 2021, the court fined activist Maria Kreitor and member of the initiative group Oleg Mandrykin for 10 thousand rubles.
In April, the residents of Severodvinsk collected more than 1 thousand signatures under an appeal to the governor demanding to cancel the construction of the Kvartal-100 high-rise residential estate in the Central City Park.