Riga loses over €740,000 in state funding for street lamp replacement
Riga's city council has abandoned a street lighting upgrade tender after the Procurement Monitoring Bureau twice overturned its choice of winner, leaving too little time to finish by April 2027. The city has lost access to €740,000 of state emission allowance funding.
The Riga municipality has terminated a tender to replace 2,459 street light fixtures, meaning the Latvian capital has lost the chance to use more than €740,000 in state funding. The matter was reported by Latvian Television's programme "De facto". The tender was halted in September because the new lamps could no longer be installed before the project deadline of 2 April 2027. Earlier, the Procurement Monitoring Bureau (IUB), the state body that reviews procurement complaints, had twice overturned the city's choice of winner.
How the tender unfolded
Last year Riga secured state money to modernise lighting in many of its neighbourhoods. The project was estimated to cost about one million euros, of which €740,000 could be covered from state-managed emission allowance revenue. The city has about 52,000 street lamps; 19,000 of them are LED fixtures, while 33,000 are older sodium lamps that use more electricity.
The tender was announced last October, and four companies submitted bids. The cheapest, just under €450,000, came from "RCG Lighthouse". In April this year the city rejected three bidders and picked "Vizulo Solutions", which offered to do the work for €523,000. The rejected companies complained to the IUB, which overturned the decision. In July the city chose "Vizulo Solutions" again, but the IUB overturned that decision too, concluding that the city had not fully established whether "RCG Lighthouse" fixtures failed the requirements.
Positions of the parties
Kristaps Kauliņš, director of the Riga City Council's Public Space and Mobility Department, says the city sees no mistakes and that there was not enough time for the work. "RCG Lighthouse" accuses the city of not asking bidders whether they could finish in the remaining time and questions the commission's objectivity. "Vizulo Solutions" blames the delays on competitors' appeals and denies involvement in preparing the city's documents, although the files' metadata lists its representatives as authors. An internal city check found no violations.
What next
In early November Riga returned an advance of more than €370,000 to the state, but the funding will not vanish and can be used for other projects. The Ministry of Climate and Energy is preparing a new €20 million support programme that would allow project deadlines to be extended. Replacing the lamps would have saved about €100,000 a year.
