The Interlocutor of “Pobjeda” last week optimistically announced that the works will start around this time, which would mean that the pool will be operational in the spring. However, after appealing to the State Procurement Review Committee by "Artik", they suspect that it is an obstruction and a deliberate job delay.
In favor of this opinion goes that the events which follow the reconstruction work and the facts found out during his conversation with Almer Kalač, who was Director of Public Works until last week. "The tender is, obviously, deliberately badly prepared, there are things in the design brief that are not on site. In the technical description, for example, it is written that the task of the contractor is to "remove the existing fence and put in a new one, and the pool does not have a fence. In addition, “Artik” did not take part in the tender, did not participate. Meanwhile, we learn that it is actually a sister company of "Erlang" which has performed the first phase of reconstruction. It is the same founder, the same owner. So, everything suggests that this is not about the omissions of the administration, but about the intention to delay the reconstruction of the pool," explains Pajovic.
An additional problem is, he says, that the appeal procedure may last for months, as per the last tender lasted six months. "The Directorate of Public Works, which is under the auspices of the Ministry of Sustainable Development and Tourism, obviously cannot find the solution itself, so it must be sought at a higher level. The state must be included. If we continue this way, everything done so far will be lost, the same as water polo is being neglected because of the lack of a pool," says Pajovic.
The reconstruction of the indoor pool takes place in three phases. The government outlined 700,000 euros in the budget this year for the second phase, and all reconstruction work at the pool was estimated at 4.5 million euros.
Text by Pobjeda, on September 26th, 2018, read more at CdM
