POLAND:Waiting for a bypass is not just an Irish pastime. The 50,000 residents of the historic spa town of Augustow in northeastern Poland have spent more than 15 years waiting for theirs.
More than 5,000 trucks and cars belch through the town's narrow streets each day and residents hoped things would soon change, with work on the bypass scheduled to start tomorrow.
The problem is that the overpass - part of the new Via Baltica highway from Warsaw to Helsinki - would pass through the Rospuda Valley nature reserve, prized for its rare plant and animal species, including at least 15 kinds of wild orchid as well as eagles, wolves and lynx.
Seven years ago the EU put the Rospuda Valley on a list of protected conservation sites and Warsaw signed up to protect it. European Commission officials yesterday reminded Polish officials of this commitment in light of the bypass which Brussels argues would irreparably damage the Rospuda wetlands.
Local officials say the overpass, half a kilometre over the valley, would cause minimum damage to the reserve and would ease noise, air pollution and traffic congestion in Augustow.
They say the upgrade to Poland's scrappy highway network would provide an economic boost by linking the area to neighbouring Belarus, Lithuania, Russia and the Russian port enclave of Kaliningrad.
But, as in Ireland's Hill of Tara dispute, conservationists criticise local officials for not considering an alternative route that avoids the valley entirely and which, they say, would cost €17 million less to build. Polish officials say the proposed alternative route would displace far more farmers from their land.
Yesterday's intervention by the commission brought to a head a row that has been simmering for months.
Augustow locals demonstrated in favour of the bypass yesterday, clashing with environmentalists who have descended on the wetlands in recent months.
More than 140,000 people opposed to the bypass signed an online petition by Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper. Eight environmental groups including Greenpeace and WWF Polska published an open letter in that paper yesterday, reminding the government: "On entering the EU, Poland promised to observe the community's laws."
The government has said it would pay for the controversial bypass out of the state budget. But EU officials have already frozen several hundred million zloty of structural funds for other planned road projects that affect at least five nature reserves.
