Tbilisi Mayor: Protests Hinder Municipal Services

Gigi Ugulava, an influential mayor of Tbilisi, said ongoing protests hinder the city municipality to provide its basic services in the areas of protest venues and nearby streets.

“We will do our best in order to get to the streets adjacent to Mtatsminda and Sololaki districts, where access is restricted and where it is impossible for cleaning service and other communal services to access those areas. From Today, I hope, we will be able to somehow access those streets in order to arrange elementary cleaning works,” Tbilisi Mayor Gigi Ugulava told reporters on April 24.

"Unfortunately, water and sewerage works cannot be carried out there and in case of damages it is very difficult to get to these places quickly. We also face some problems in terms of transportation. Now we are establishing new routes to remove this problem for our citizens,” he said.

After the late-night incident at the protest venue outside the Parliament on April 11, Gigi Ugulava said that the municipal services would stay away from the protests venues to avoid possible complications and provocations.

“Our task is to prevent a contact between persons in uniforms – whether they are from police, cleaning service; firefighter service or emergency medical service – and protesters, because there might be case when someone may act aggressively,” Ugulava said.

Opposition said the municipality’s tactic amounted to saying no to its immediate duties. In following days opposition activists started cleaning the protest venues themselves. On April 23 opposition hired a truck to transport waste from the protest venue; en-route to the Tbilisi Mayor’s Office, which the opposition said it wanted to pass in a symbolic sign of the municipality’s failure to fulfill its duty, the truck was stopped by the patrol police and taken to dump, claiming that the opposition planned to unload the waste outside the Tbilisi Mayor’s Office. A minor scuffle took place between police officers and opposition politician, Bidzina Gujabidze of Conservative Party, who was accompanying the truck.

This post is also available in: ქართული (Georgian) Русский (Russian)