Improvements on Kehä III ring road to begin next year
Bureaucratic snags threatened schedule of project
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Major repairs to the Kehä III ring road are to begin in the autumn of 2009, with the help of a loan from the City of Vantaa to the state, says the Ministry of Finance.
The project is to be launched in spite of the fact that the EUR 50 million needed for it was not included in the Finance Ministry’s budget proposal.
“Everyone who has driven on Kehä III knows that it is quite congested, and the Vuosaari harbour will only exacerbate the situation”, said Minister of Finance Jyrki Katainen (Nat. Coalition Party) on Friday.
The view expressed by the Minister of Finance means that work will begin next year to ease the bottleneck which exists between the Jumbo shopping mall and the Hämeenlinna motorway.
The absence of funding for the Kehä III project in the Finance Ministry’s budget proposal sparked a small political panic on Friday.
“It was quite a surprise for us that the improvement of the ring road had been taken off the proposal of the Ministry of Finance”, says Juhani Tervala, the leading civil servant at the Ministry of Transport and Communications.
The chairman of the City Council of Vantaa, MP Tapani Mäkinen (Nat. Coalition Party) said that his phone began to ring as soon as the budget proposal was made public.
The panic was caused by a bureaucratic slip.
“The ministries had interpreted each other incorrectly at the civil servant level”, Katainen observed.
The Ministry of Transport had sent its proposal for the launch of the project by e-mail, but the Ministry of Finance had not agreed to include it in the budget.
“According to the official protocol, only documents signed by the minister are taken into consideration”, Katainen explained.
The matter is to be corrected in the budget talks in the autumn.
The construction of a rail bypass in Vantaa is also scheduled to begin next year. The state is budgeting EUR 404 million for the entire project, for which EUR 20 million is to be spent next year.
The state will also provide EUR 6.8 million for the westward extension of the Helsinki Metro.
Helsingin Sanomat
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| 4.8.2008 - TODAY |
 Improvements on Kehä III ring road to begin next year |
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