An American expert will conduct a one-month performance assessment of the Chisinau City Hall and make proposals of optimising its activity. Chisinau Mayor General Dorin Chirtoaca says the assessment is part of the agreements reached at the recent meeting with U.S. Ambassador to Chisinau Michael Kirby. “It is a common practice used in a number of institutions in Moldova that will enable us to obtain some positive results”, the mayor said. Chirtoaca said that the American expert, specialised in public administration and public policies, will contribute to a higher level of efficiency in the local administration, and to the optimisation of the City Hall’s organisation in particular and of the local public authorities in general. Recently, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Moldova also showed interest in enhancing efficiency of the local public administration, and proposed to the municipality a project for the reorganisation of the City Hall’s office and eventually of the departments subordinated to the City Council. The project envisages assessing at the first stage the present structures of the City Hall. At the second stage, UNDP will propose, depending on the municipality’s development strategies, optimal ways of improving the city administration according to the principles of the market economy. The UNDP project for the City Hall targets other important issues as well, such as the optimisation of decision-making through assessing information flows, improvement of planning, monitoring, and management of human resources and public finances. Asked whether he will announce contests to recruit new employees for the City Hall, Dorin Chirtoaca said that for the moment the priority is to elect the deputy mayors and the president of the City Council “in order to unblock the situation at the top of the local administration”, and only after that such contests will be announced.