You're reading: Lviv mayor hopes the city will lead in tourism, IT sector

 LVIV, Ukraine -- On a sticky hot Saturday, Lviv Mayor Andriy Sadoviy is doing the very thing that city residents have refined to perfection: he's drinking coffee while talking business.

He’s a regular client in a
downtown coffee house,
where he comes unguarded and sometimes accompanied by his large
family. He and
his wife Kateryna have five small children. The staff knows the
mayor’s
favorites (cappuccino and chocolate-topped cheesecake,
occasionally a macaroon).
He will order charlotte pie for the children.

When it comes to running
the city, his range of
competence is much wider. He will joke about the city’s logo to
say it’s the
coolest because it has five phallic symbols on it. But when he
has a guest smiling
and at ease, he will talk about strategy for the city’s
development, discuss local
challenges with passion and reflect on his personal limitations
and the future
of the nation.

More than a month after
hosting Euro 2012 football
matches, Lviv is still basking in the good press it got. Most
recently, The Economist
wrote a glowing piece
, calling it a “faded gem.”

The city’s biggest
infrastructure project in the past
50 years was built for the tournament – the Hr 1.4 billion Lviv
Arena stadium,
which will cost an estimated Hr 20 million per year to run. Its
crumbling airport
terminal was replaced with a brand new one, too, complete with a
runway and a
new road. So, the challenge now is to use all this
infrastructure.

Sadoviy, who will turn 44
this month, is aware of his
mission.

“The [Euro] showed us that
the city has a great
potential. We can receive even bigger events than this,” Sadoviy
says. “Despite the
skepticism of UEFA officials, everything turned out to be very
cool. And we did
it with no money [from the city budget], just because we love
the city and are
doing it for ourselves.”

Vasyl Rasevych, a local
historian, says Lviv pulled it
off because “we’re great actors.” He says as soon as the
tournament went away,
people “stopped smiling and went back to the normal, Soviet
expressions on
their faces.”

Rasevych said that both
the locals and the visitors loved
the effect and the atmosphere the tournament brought.

Sadoviy says he will now
join the lobby that wants
Ukraine to bid for the 2022 Winter Olympics in the Carpathians,
for the sake of
both business and promoting healthy lifestyles. But that’s just
a part of the
plan.

He says he wants to see
the city getting five times
more tourists per year, up from the current 1 million. The city
itself has less
than 800,000 residents.

Sadoviy’s Institute of the
City, a consulting body
partially financed from the municipal budget, as well as other
groups, are
trying to make the idea of tourism work. They plan festivals and
other cultural
events to draw the tourists, and Sadoviy meets with various
groups of
businesses on a regular basis to brainstorm about city promotion
and discuss
current issues.



Lviv Mayor Andriy Sadoviy (UNIAN)

Next year, the city’s new
brainchild will be a beer
festival.

The strategy is paying off
already: this year, the
Lviv airport plans to receive 600,000 passengers, or twice the
number compared
to 2011. This is still way behind the 1990 level, when the
number stood at 1
million.

Sadoviy says a little help
from the central government
is needed for a further “lion’s jump.” He would like to see a
low-cost airline
flying to Lviv from other Ukrainian cities, particularly from
the eastern parts
of the country.

He says it’s absurd that
Lviv has cheap flights to
four Polish cities, and two more are coming, while there is only
one
 expensive domestic flight connecting the city with Kyiv.
Sadoviy says he
is working with the Irish budget airline Ryanair to get them
flying all around
Ukraine.

Lviv is hedging its bets
also. It’ betting on a
multi-level strategy, where tourism and the IT sector are
identified as the new
powerful industries for the city to develop. The strategy was
designed by
Massachusetts-headquartered international consultancy Monitor
Group, with the
financing from Effective Governance Foundation that belongs to
Ukraine’s
richest man Rinat Akhmetov.

After Lviv, the same
company designed new strategies
 for Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk Oblasts.

“These two clusters allow
us to become leaders in
Ukraine. We won’t become leaders in machine building or chemical
industry, but
we have every chance to become leaders in tourism and IT,” says
Sadoviy.

For Sadoviy himself, this
strategy also pays off from
the social point of view: those industries pay good salaries and
give impetus
for related sectors, for example, hospitality and transport.

Andriy Khudo and Yuriy
Nazaruk, a duo of restaurateurs
who have clashed with the mayor in the past over a property in a
historic
place, say despite his flaws such as micromanagement, the mayor
has done a
reasonable job running the city since 2006, when he was elected
for the first
time. He is doing his second term.

They say he gets involved
in minute details of city
planning where people like architects should have more of a say.
Sadoviy
acknowledges this tendency, but says sometimes it’s justified.
“Business can
tear the city apart” if it’s not kept in check, he says. The
choking, nearly lawless  Kyiv
is a good case in point.

Sadoviy says he spends
about 80 percent of his time
following up on individual cases of residents who come to him
with their
troubles. As he talks, an elderly lady approaches and starts to
complain about
being charged for heating in the summer. She quickly moves on to
call him “a
crook” because she heard on the radio that he got a lump sum
from his parents.

Sadoviy listens to her
stoically, but his emotions are
evident. “She must have her own grief,” he concludes later, and
adds that
people like her help him to stay on top of things.

“The power needs to be
pushed. The power tends to set
like concrete, so it needs constant stimulus,” he says.

He adds that he is getting
plenty. But he doesn’t mind
because he’s doing his dream job – building a comfortable city.

 Kyiv Post
editor Katya Gorchinskaya can be reached at [email protected]