Telecommunications company Bite Latvija has filed a lawsuit against the Riga City Council: the issue concerns the construction of cable routes (not in the form of overhead cables) in several projects in the center of Riga (at 30 Miera Street and 78A Terbatas Street). This sheds light on a larger problem of why cables thrown from one building to another in Riga and other cities sway in the wind and spoil the urban environment, including creating dangerous situations and restricting development. This is written by Diena. According to Bite, the Riga City Council has failed to fulfill its statutory obligations so that businesses can comply with the requirement to lay underground cables. Instead, the City Council is unreasonably shifting its responsibility onto the shoulders of businesses, while simultaneously prohibiting the maintenance of existing overhead cable routes. In this regard, the local government noted that Bite Latvija filed an application to recognize the actual inaction of the Riga local government, which failed to ensure the laying of underground cable routes, as unlawful. According to the company, the local government should have laid underground communication routes so that overhead electronic communication lines could be moved underground. However, the Riga local government's City Development Department considers these claims to be unfounded. The local government says that no regulatory act stipulates that the city is obliged to build extremely expensive underground infrastructure to ensure the commercial activities of individual entrepreneurs. In addition, given the dense location of utility networks in the center of Riga, it is often impossible to place electronic communication networks underground. The publication also reports that there are several (at least 60) processes at various stages between Bite Latvija and the Riga local government, including in court, regarding the unauthorized construction of networks by the enterprise. That is, a significant part of the electronic communication networks are installed illegally. If they were moved underground, it would turn out that the local government was financing the elimination of the consequences of the businessman’s unauthorized construction.
