Around 8,000 residents in the village of Bubq, Kruje municipality, who lacked access to almost any essential service, even a community and administrative in their administrative unit to date, in few months’ time will be provided with the entire required infrastructure thanks to the inclusion of this area hit hard by the Nov 26 earthquake in the government-launched post-earthquake recovery and reconstruction program. Not only the damaged homes and destroyed apartment buildings, which will be reconstructed in two model residential neighbourhoods, but the entire administrative unit in the municipality of Kruja will undergo complete transformation through a state budget fund of $2.5 million to build and upgrade infrastructure, with the construction work already underway on the ground.
Prime Minister Edi Rama, accompanied by the Minister of State for Reconstruction Arben Ahmetaj, today visited this reconstruction site, where work continues to implement the new development plan on the administrative and community centre.
“Some 45 apartment houses and 132 individual houses will be constructed in Bubq, meeting around 45 percent of the housing and construction needs in the administrative unit, where we actually plan to build a total of 300 houses. In addition to the housing project, the development plan also includes modern public and community centres to provide residents access to a range of public services. A new school, a health care centre, post office building, a police station and a small local market will be built inside the new residential neighbourhood,” Mayor of Kruja Artur Bushi said.
“Work is already underway to build the engineering infrastructure, water supply and wastewater and sewerage discharge systems and construction of the road network in the entire administrative unit. Work has kicked off to build first two new bridges. It is a brand new road network which will provide access to the whole area. We will also build a local centre to house all administrative and public service offices. This clears the way to work for construction of housing units,” said Dritan Agolli, the Head of the Albanian Development Fund.
The Reconstruction Minister noted that the reconstruction project will serve not only the families directly affected by the earthquake by losing their houses, but also the communities in the surrounding areas.
“The project will serve not only the households eligible to benefit under the reconstruction program, but the entire area of Bubq. It will become a community centre for the entire area, because no such a centre has ever existed here. The work to construct infrastructure would progress significantly until end of September and it would allow us to start construction of individual homes and the apartment buildings,” Ahmetaj said.
Prime Minister Rama noted that the process has gone through a series phases to reach the today’s final stage.
“it is a process that includes many stages, starting with the assessment process, the verification and identification of damages and complaints, finding the financial means, preparing the design, the tender procedures and all projects are underway in terms of infrastructure development. Certainly, impatience grows day by day but the most unbearable impatience is for those who have nothing to do with this process and who are in their own homes, but still keep criticizing, cursing and advising irrelevantly. However, the reconstruction program here will turn out to be a fantastic thing. Due contracts will be drafted and signed with all of those whose houses will be built from scratch and they will wait for the start and completion of the construction work with their contract in hand and precisely aware of when and what they will benefit, because it takes a certain time for the construction work to complete and it cannot be done in the blink of an eye. Likewise, a very good centre will be built here as we will also tackle the problems in delivering public services in the area,” PM Rama said.
