Complaints cause further delays to construction of Vaalimaa truck park

Appealing parties take truck parking lot plans to Supreme Administrative Court

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The construction of the much-needed parking lot for trucks near the Vaalimaa crossing point is set to experience further delays.
      According to the original plans, at least a section of the huge parking lot - designed to accommodate as many as a thousand articulated lorries - should have opened next month. The complaints filed with the Kouvola Administrative Court have postponed the start of the construction work in such a way that the government’s Wednesday eastbound traffic package was already speaking of the end of next year.
      And even then only a section of the parking area that is scheduled for completion in 2010 would be introduced. Now even that estimate is gradually proving too optimistic, for after the Administrative Court dismissed the complaints, another appeal has already been filed with the Supreme Administrative Court (KHO).
      Antti Rinta-Porkkunen, Director of the South-East Finland Road District, says that the Road Administration will stay put until a fully watertight permission to commence the construction work has been issued. The appeal process with KHO will take between six months and two years.
     
Even though the building of the parking lot is delayed, the plans are not in danger of getting outdated. They only need updating after a five-year delay, Rinta-Porkkunen says.
      The Road Administration will not start looking of its own initiative for a temporary parking facility for the trucks waiting to cross the border. Previously, a temporary truck park was experimented with near the Vaalimaa frontier station, but there the directing of traffic tied up too much of the workforce.
     
With KHO the appealing parties have renewed the same demands that they already presented to the Kouvola Administrative Court.
      The economic losses caused to the landowners by the changes to the local plan would be unreasonable. Furthermore, the truck park is also said to be detrimental to the area’s nature and landscape values, and even hazardous to people’s health and livelihood.
      If and when it is completed, the truck park would be able to accommodate an equivalent number of vehicles that would otherwise cause a 30-km tailback on roads leading to the border.


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Parking fees, tolls, and road use bans in prospect for eastbound truck traffic (6.11.2008)

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