Chisinau budget for 2010 adopted in second reading

The Chisinau Municipal Council passed the next year's budget of the municipality of Chisinau in second reading. The budget for 2010 lei will be 1.9 billion lei, up about 6% compared with this year's budget, Info-Prim Neo reports. According to deputy mayor Mihai Furtuna, the revenues of 1.7 billion lei will be covered from the salary tax collections (about 958m lei or 7.8% up), local tax collection (33m lei or 31% up), allocations from the state budget (187m lei or 39% up), and other sources. The expenditure will be about 1.9 billion lei. The deficit of 217 million lei will be covered from the incomes from auctioning of plots of land (50m lei), privatization of dwellings (4m lei), privatization of adjoining land (48m lei), privatization of the nonresidential stock (15m lei), privatization of municipal property (100m lei). “The budget for 2010 will be a social budget,” said Furtuna. “The spending for education, healthcare, culture and social assistance constitutes 64% of the total budget,” the deputy mayor said. The costs for paying the public utilities for budget-funded institutions will be 100 million lei, while the compensations for public utilities paid to the population - 98 million lei. The capital investments in 2010 will be 275 million lei, up 240 million lei from this year. A sum of 20 million lei was earmarked for repairing education institutions, while 13.3 million lei for repairing medical institutions. Mihai Furtuna said the education and medical institutions will also benefit from budgetary allocations when distributing the investments, while the sums collected from the sale of municipal property will be used to construct apartment buildings for vulnerable groups of people under public-private partnerships. The municipal budget was adopted by a majority of votes.