City Hall hasn’t selected the refugees to receive apartments

The City Hall hasn’t yet decided who of the 300 internally displaced families from Transnistria that requested housing will receive flats in an 80-apartment house. Although the block has been under construction for quite a while now, Mayor Dorin Chirtoaca said today at a City Hall meeting that the Housing Department has started examining the files of the displaced persons waiting for a flat only some days ago. He also asked them to pay close attention to the “way the flat distribution is proposed”. Even though the Government said 3 million lei was needed to finish up the construction works, announcing also that it would cover 50% of costs, the interim chief of the City Construction Department, Ion Dermengi, stated that the necessary expenditures amount to 9.2 million lei. Out of these, 2.5 million are to be covered by the state budget and 7 million by the local budget. According to him, these are expenditures for improving the initial project and installing autonomous heating systems in each of the apartment, as well as thermopane windows. Given that the Government conditioned the payment of the 1.5 million lei on the completion of the construction by September 1, it is still not known if the City Hall will manage to do it. Additional financing wasn’t included in the draft budget, and the decision to pay more has to be approved by the City Council, whose next meeting is scheduled for the end of August. The construction works started in 2005. The total cost of the construction topped 33 million lei, out of which 14 million were already paid by the state budget and 10 million from the local budget. The building is expected to house families in September. 80 families will receive apartment keys. The Movement of Transnistrian refugees has protested more than once in front of the Government, asking for the fulfillment of its promise to allocate funds for providing the internally displaced persons with housing.