On September 17, Bulgaria's Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev will open the repaired section of the road from the southwestern city of Blagoevgrad to the Rila Mountain area of Bodrost. He will also visit the ski resort Bodrost-Kartala that is under construction near where a devastating fire surged in Rila National Park for eight days. The coalition To Sustain the Nature in Bulgaria (SNB) sent a letter to Stanishev on September 16 informing him that constructing a ski lift and expanding Bodrost ski routes breaches Bulgaria's environmental legislation.

The new 6km section of the municipal road network is exceptionally important for the development of tourism in Blagoevgrad municipality, Focus news agency reported. The agency went on to say that the project for ski resort Bodrost-Kartala would be carried out in three stages in the period 2007/2010, with total investment amounting to 50 million leva.

The lift construction has already started but according to SNB it is without a decision on an environmental impact assessment of the lift.  Permission has been given to build the ski pistes without evaluing if an environmental impact assessment is needed, while road construction and cuttings in the woods owned by the State Forestry Fund have been carried out illegally.

SNB approached the Prosecutor's Office, the Ministry of Environment and Water Affairs and the State Forestry Agency for the various violations it discovered. "Blagoevgrad Regional Inspectorate on Environment and Water Affairs established the violations for the first time on October 10 2007 in its report Nr.4-16. Since then, none of the institutions undertook any measures to stop the illegal construction," the SNB media statement said.

Therefore, SNB included the "Kartala resort case" in the official claim to the European Commission of non-governmental organisations on violations in Rila Mountain and Rila National Park.