Clean Water at Fair Price

Boxing: Civil Association „Public Barometer” against the Water Supply and Sewerage Systems Ltd – Sliven

Yurii Ivanov is a chairperson of the Civil Association “Public Barometer” in the town of Sliven. The NGO is a recipient of two honorary diplomas (2003 and 2004) and the 2005 Golden Key Award presented by the Access to Information Programme at the Right to Know Day Awards Ceremony on September 28. “Public Barometer” is among the NGOs that most actively use the Access to Public Information Act in anticorruption investigations and in activities aiming at more transparency of companies providing public services. The association has won a number of access to information cases in court and has published the obtained information on their web site.

Diana Bancheva

What are the tasks in the current work of “Public Barometer”?

Currently, “Public Barometer” is focused in the quality of the public service “household water supply” and issues related to the discrimination against customers of that service. People from the town are critical towards the Water Supply and Sewerage Systems Ltd – Sliven and we have naturally started to monitor and investigate the work of the company. Around 4-5 years ago, the company was transformed. A number of private water associations were formed. Employees were transferred from the company and back. We have received a lot of complaints from people who had been fired from the company. No one could understand what was going on. We investigated the case for a year and it served as a ground for the next step. We moved the focus from the corruption schemes in the legal transformation of the company towards the price and the quality of the household water supply.
 
The price of the service in Sliven is several times higher in comparison to other Bulgarian cities. It was absolutely unclear why we had to pay more considering the method of the water supply – using the gravity and not electrical pumps. We started questioning the quality of the service and the quality of the water we were drinking. It turned out that there was a big deficit in the water regulations. We launched an advocacy campaign on our web site where we published all the documents we had received in search for the solution of the problem. Thus, we were making publicly available information about the work of the Water Supply and Sewerage Systems Ltd – Sliven and the follow-up actions of the State Energy and Water Regulatory Commission on this.

How did you get access to the information?

This was a long term battle. Firstly, we tried to obtain information using the APIA. We filed requests about the annual reports of the water supply company, and the price of the service to the Ministry of Regional Development and Public Works, as the latter is the principal of the water supply companies. We received no responses and appealed in court against the silent refusals of the minister. We won one of the cases and received partial information. It was not enough to cast light on the pricing. Three letters of three ministers from three different governments stated the same – the managers of the water supply companies form the price of the service “household water supply” under the Law on the Accounting and the National Accounting Standards.

We turned to the Commission for Protection of Competition (CPC).We tried to appeal under the Law on the Protection of Fair Competition on the ground that the water supply company uses its monopolistic position and sets a monopolistically high price. The result was catastrophically unclear. We were required to present any kind of a document to prove the legal status of the civil association. Two years later, we understood that the CPC had delivered a decision, but we were not informed about that. The decision frees from any guilt the Water Supply Company – Sliven. The Commission had summoned the private water supply companies and the Ministry of the Regional Development and Public Works as parties of the case. It turned out, however, that the documents they had presented as evidence were with untrue content.

How did you find out that the content was untrue?

We filed a signal to the Commission for Protection from Discrimination. We claimed that he Water Supply Company – Sliven discriminated the citizens from the municipalities of Sliven, Nova Zagora and Kotel, while the citizens of the municipality of Kotel pay a lower price for the service compared to the other municipalities in the region of Sliven. The commission is considering the case already one year and still has not come up with a decision. All documents were requested from the CPC and we saw incredible figures. For instance, the Water Supply Company reports that the consumption of the service in the neighborhood of “Nadezhda” is 1,000 customers, while the population there is 12,000. This is absurd. 

What are the reasons for the existence of such practices?

I think that the main problem is in the now repealed Para. 3 of Art. 193 of the Law on Water. It provided that the customers should cover all expenses made by the providing company with no consideration of its expediency. The Art. 193, Para. 3 introduced the principle that citizens should cover only 25% of the loss of the trade companies. Unfortunately, it never came into force because the National Assembly was amending the law every year repealing that paragraph. Finally, the parliament repealed paragraph 3 and left in force that all losses of the supply companies should be covered 100% by the customers. Thus, the state opened a door that allowed the supply companies to either waste the water – having no stimulus to save it, or to charge differently different groups of the society, which is a discrimination practice.

What are the solutions of such a serious problem?

The key actor in this situation is the control body – the State Energy and Water Regulatory Commission. They say what is right and what is wrong. There should be legal definition of what is household water and what is drinking water, what are the characteristics of each category and how this reflects on the price of the service. I think that the Ministry of Healthcare should establish criteria for assessment of the quality of the water that we drink. They should be in compliance with the European standards.

The other body that should undertake measures is the Public Financial Inspection Agency (PFIA) – it is responsible for financial fraud.

April 2007

This case is part of the book "Civil Participation and Access to Information (15 Years of the APIA, 37 stories of NGOs)" published by AIP within the implementation of the project “Enhancing the Capacity of Nongovernmental Organizations to Seek Public Information” supported with a grant under the NGO Programme in Bulgaria under the Financial Mechanism of the European Economic Area 2009 – 2014 (www.ngogrants.bg).

The whole responsibility for the content shall be taken by the Access to Information Programme Foundaiton and it cannot be assumed under any circumstances that the document reflects the official stance of the  Financial Mechanism of the European Economic Area and the Operator of the Programme for NGO support in Bulgaria.