Penza, 3 September 2015. PenzaNews. Over 100 people took part in a public rally for higher life quality organized in Penza in the evening of Thursday, September 3, at the Dzerzhinsky public garden by initiative of the Communist Party members and supporters.

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They sported banners reading “Do Not Pay House Repair Bills!”, “We Stay Silent, They’ll Keep Siphoning Our Money!”, “Stop Healthcare Optimization!”, “People Over Profits,” “Strongly Against Pension Increase Halt. Shame!”, “Accept Law on Children of War!” and more.

The participants of the public rally also gathered signatures to support the motion to cancel the laws on capital repair bills.

In his address to the public, the Russian Duma deputy Vladimir Simagin told the people he had visited many residential areas in the Penza region.

“Everywhere people kept telling me the way they are living right now is not worth keeping. Kamenka, like Serdobsk, is nearly always dark. No sidewalks. A morgue closed down in Lunino. A hospital went off somewhere else, countryside trains cancelled, and so on and so forth. It’s all continues on its merry way,” he said.

According to Vladimir Simagin, “our life gets worse by every day and hour.”

“And they keep tying the slipknot over our neck – the necks of the people. For example, the eponymous capital repair bills is just another way to rob the population. […] Let’s take one of the hundreds of houses in Arbekovo. Its average size is 10,000 sq. meters. Multiply by 6 rubles 90 kopecks, and by 12 months, and we get about 800,000 rubles per one house for capital repairs. Enough for capital repairs, for change of windows, doors, inner hall repair over the year. And when do they say they plan to repair our houses? In ten years, fifteen, twenty! How much money will they amass by that time?” the Communist Party member asked.

He also expressed his surprise over the information on capital repair bills amounts and compared it to data from other regions.

“Let’s ask our Penza authorities […] why do we have a repair tariff of 6.90 rubles? Why? It’s 6.40 in Chelyabinsk, 5.00 in Samara, 2.50 in St. Petersburg,” Vladimir Simagin pointed out.

In conclusion of the public rally, its participants unanimously expressed their support of the resolution that claims that the quality of life in Penza and the region is suppressed by the anti-populist policy on federal, regional and local levels.

According to it, the main issues that trouble the local residents are a large number of intermediaries in urban amenity management, adverse effects of the healthcare modernization program, almost complete destruction of municipal public transportation, increasing prices on first-tier foods, troubled job market, and low salaries.

In the light of these issues, the protesters demanded to freeze bill growth, cancel capital repair bills, accept the law on children of war promoted by the CPRF, halt the healthcare modernization program, open closed-down hospitals in the region, provide worthy salaries and good hours to doctors, stop the education reforms and constant changes in education standards, and increase a teacher’s salary up to 20,000 rubles.

The rallying people also demanded to found a new municipal transportation company, bring down the fare in trolley buses to 10 rubles, make dacha bus fares affordable, fix the prices on first-tier goods, cancel the food sanction destruction measures, and support the motion of the CPRF leader Gennady Zyuganov on donating the sanctioned goods to poor citizens.