Yerevan City Council Member Gayane Vardanyan Resigns from Her Mandate

Yerevan City Council member Gayane Vardanyan has submitted a resignation letter for her council mandate.

We present Gayane Vardanyan's statement in full:

"Dear Yerevan residents, friends, colleagues,

The ‘My Step’ faction of Yerevan City Council, elected in September 2018, was an inclusive unit that fully expressed the values and ideology of the revolution. I took on the responsibility of a council member to participate in solving the city’s problems and have tried to do this every day for the past three years without complaint and with great dedication. But that is not what I want to talk about.

Since the election, we energetically engaged in our work. Our faction was highly active, both individually and in working groups, with everyone having their own tasks. The mayor also frequently participated in our meetings, and we discussed our tasks together, staying well informed about everything happening at the mayor's office. However, gradually, the situation changed.

In my firm belief, our faction weakened considerably due to various members of our partners becoming MPs in the 2018 National Assembly elections and the continuous changes in our composition thereafter.

After opposing the salary increase proposal from the mayor's office, our relationship with the mayor was no longer what it used to be. We rarely met with him; often, we learned about the projects from the Yerevan mayor's website or media, rather than through our own discussions.

In our last faction meeting, I reiterated to my colleagues that we, as a faction, failed to become the force with which the mayor would collaborate. There were people whom we had not seen for months. Attendance at our faction meetings often had fewer than half of the members, and the same was true for City Council sessions.

The mayor, for his part, did not make sufficient efforts to ensure the necessary cooperative relations with our faction for advancing critical community reforms and making those reforms part of his agenda.

Throughout this, I have tried to talk about the importance of dialogue with both sides, but perhaps I did not convey my message well; I don't know. Ultimately, it resulted in me and several of my colleagues continuing our work for Yerevan while often lacking sufficient information on various issues from both sides.

For example, it remains unclear to me why some of my colleagues participated in the publicly discussed sabotage regarding the acquisition of buses, aside from the general assertion that