Municipality in focus: Burgas
Like most Bulgarian municipalities having big natural resources and attracting tourists Burgas has always in the focus and interests of big investors.
It is a fact that along the whole Southern Black Sea coastline there are a large number of residential estates and complexes and hotels which lead to boosting the investment activity and to the drastic increase of the number of sold real property. The net amount of the foreign direct investment in the non-financial sector in Burgas grew with 18% within a year only.
The last six months the world and economic crisis changed the situation, the investments became scarce, the number of real property transactions dropped while they were one of the main source of revenues for the municipal budgets.
According to mayor Dimitar Nikolov the greatest competition between the municipalities now is for the EU funding because the projects will guarantee low unemployment, orders for the local companies and relative stability of the regional economy.
Burgas has a few major infrastructure projects underway like the integrated water project with a budget of EUR 21m, of which 48% are by ISPA programme with 52% as a loan from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
The municipality has four developing projects by Regional Development programme and four projects by Environment operational programme, as well as a project for integrated transport of Burgas with the support of JASPERS.