Yerevan Mayor Tigran Avinyan stated that the project for building the Ajapnyak metro station is fully prepared and has passed all required expert reviews, including a “simple examination” phase that alone took more than a year.
He noted this was due to the unprecedented complexity of the project, which Armenian legislation had not previously encountered at such a scale, Radar Armenia reported.
“This is why the main delays occurred. Our approach is to invest more time in the design and technical oversight stages so that construction management remains under control both in terms of quality and timing,” Avinyan explained.
He announced that a special government decision concerning the station will be adopted next year, marking the next major step for the project.
Earlier, Avinyan had revealed that only a portion of the AMD 9.6 billion allocated from the state budget for the project had been used. AMD 1.6 billion was reallocated toward purchasing 45 new trolleybuses for Yerevan. He had emphasized that this was one of independent Armenia’s most complex engineering projects, and that spending the full amount within one fiscal year had been practically impossible.
In a Facebook post, Daniel Ioannisyan, programs coordinator for the Union of Informed Citizens NGO, criticized the delays, writing: “This government, like the previous one, is incapable of implementing large infrastructure projects. The Ajapnyak metro station got botched again.”
