2023-04-23 16:20:21
EU funds
At first an entire country laughed at him, now he wants to show all the media that have made fun of his project: The mayor of Nyírmártonfalva had a treetop path laid out where not a single tree stands.
The place Nyírmártonfalva became “famous” through an article of the unveiling portal atlatszo.hu. A few weeks ago, the portal made fun of the treetop path in the middle of a “Puszta” landscape. Mayor Mihály Filemon immediately demanded that the article be corrected, because the said EU funds (60 million forints, around 155,000 euros at today’s prices) had not yet been paid. In addition, the wooden walkway (on the photos) not only 50 meters long, as atlatszo.hu wrongly claimed, but stretched over 80 meters.
Trees were not a requirement
The reason why there are no trees around the treetop path has to do with the lack of funding for years: He won the money for the project in 2017, but the existing forest had grown so high in the meantime that it was ready to be cut down. That happened in 2022, i.e. parallel to the construction work for the treetop path, which now has to wait about ten years until the new plantings reach a “considerable” height. In fact, the entrepreneur is said to have won 600 million forints for reforestation programs in a second tender in 2017 (he also contests this sum). Where the new forest should be planted remains opaque.
Filemon has been an entrepreneur for decades, successfully siphoning off EU funds for a wide variety of projects. Three years ago he was elected mayor of the village with around 2,000 inhabitants. He counters his critics of the treetop path project by saying that it was not a condition for investing in the wooden walkway that it had to run through a forest.
Nyírség maybe not the ideal place
The business mayor explains that if the EU puts something out to tender, you have to use it; the tenders are very good, the criteria are very strict. To date, however, no money has flowed. Opposition politicians complained that four treetop paths were laid out within a radius of 15 km. Filemon said to the government-critical private broadcaster RTL: “If there is a tender, everyone can participate. I don’t understand what the problem is here.”
With a treetop or treetop path, one imagines constructions at lofty heights of a few tens of meters, in Germany the well-known nature paths are laid out at a height of 25-45 meters. The length is usually around a few hundred meters, in exceptional cases it is more than a thousand meters. Special trees are shown in nature parks or other nature reserves.
None of this can be found in the Nyírség. However, this area has long been known to connoisseurs of the bizarre allocation of EU funds. Because even before the boom with the treetop paths, all kinds of lookout towers were built there without a view – it’s flat land.
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