Chisinau councilors disagree on 2009 municipal budget

Chisinau councilors hold contradictory views about the city's spending plans and revenue targets for this year. A proposal by the Communist faction to raise the budget by 314 million lei to 1.79 billion lei was passed yesterday by the City Council (CMC), despite objections from the opposition. “[PCRM] insisted that both expenses and planned receipts be increased by 300 million lei, and the fact that the proposal was endorsed by a majority of votes (27 out of 51) demonstrates that there is money our there, albeit the executive branch claims the opposite”, declared [Svetlana Popa, leader of the Communist faction]. “Later we'll call a press conference to tell where this money can be taken from, for each municipal division”, she added. [Liberal Party leader Mihai Ghimpu] thinks the initiative to raise the budget by over 300 million lei “is a populist move ahead of the parliamentary elections”. “The CMC is always asking the mayor for more money. Once the majority in the Council decided to pass an illusory budget, they must assume full political responsibility for this decision. Because when they finally see that no money is coming in, and I tell you there's no source it can possibly come from, they'll have to cut on spending. As a result, roads will not be cleared during the winter, roofing will not be repaired on schools and kindergartens, streets will remain unswept. If there is no income, what's the point of raises?”, said Ghimpu. [AMN councilor Oleg Cernei], describes the budget proposal as being “an expenditure plan for each subdivision, rather than a budget for the municipality”. “My definition of a budget is when parts of the income are earmarked for capital investment, for housing projects, for infrastructure. But unfortunately, the budget we have is consumption-oriented. The problem lies in the way the government makes budget allocations. The financial policies must be modified so that the municipality of Chisinau gets back at least 50 percent of its revenue contribution to the State Budget, like in happens in other capitals of the world. In our country, however, Chisinau is discriminated, because it gets but 2 million lei in allocations. This is disdain and mockery of the local administration” declared Cernei. [Liberal-Democratic faction leader Alexandru Tanase], says that the budget in its current version is “a risky venture, a document totally devoid of the sense of reality”. “Our doubts were rather big as to the accumulation capacity of the budget proposal drafted by the mayor, and are even greater now with 300 million lei added. It is an attempt by the Communist, Christian-Democrat and Social-Democrat factions to frustrate the mayor, whose obligation is to execute that budget, yet the burden of this irresponsible judgment will fall on the shoulders of every resident of Chisinau”, Tanase said. According to [Emil Gutu, leader of the Social-Democratic faction], this is the first budget without a deficit in Chisinau's history. “The budget proposed initially was doomed to failure. It didn't even cover the smallest needs of the municipality. It was a continuation of the vicious practice by the City Hall, which would initially adopt an absurdly scarce budget in order to report better than expected results later, boasting before the population, the Council and the Government. But, in recent years, receipt targets have been overachieved by 30 percent on average, and this means terribly poor planning. By adopting a new budget, we want to put an end to such practices. This one is reasonable and can be achieved. It does set goals high, but those who don't aim high, never get there”, the PSD faction leader said. “When we put all the tax collection possibilities together, we obtained a reasonable figure”, said [Alexandru Corduneanu, leader of the Christian-Democratic faction]. “We are on a slight upward trend on the previous years. The targets are balanced, as we decided to spare ourselves of a budget deficit. We even might do better than expected in terms of incomes, because you can't estimate all the incomes at the beginning of the year, say, proceeds from land privatization deals. There will be no money if you don't look for and earn it. Extended taxation, budget strengthening, expenditure cuts – all these measures mean advanced governance”, says Corduneanu. Commenting on the subject, [City Council Chairman Eduard Musuc] said: “the budget for 2008 was not just deficient, but also a failure, because it failed to solve many acute problems of the city. We couldn't adopt a budget that would not envisage the development of the city. The adoption of the budget for 2009 in first reading demonstrates that we've set more ambitious goals, that we have development plans. We made the right decision, and the executive should make efforts for the economical and financial situation to improve... We passed a better budget than the initially proposed” one,” said Musuc. [Mayor Dorin Chirtoaca] thinks the 300 million raise “is too much in the current circumstances”. “Even the most optimistic expectations do not predict such a financial inflow. Rather we should listen to the forecasts of the specialists, and if more money comes in, we could redirect them later. A risk is that this money could be used to pay the debt that we allegedly owe to Termocom and to enforce abusive court decisions. The majority grouping could spend the money not on the development of the municipality, but for facilitating such monopolies as Termocom. The budget must be fair, based on real income sources”, Chirtoaca maintained. The city's budget still needs a second stage of voting to become statutory. A date for the City Council's meeting hasn't been determined yet.