Compensations for heat paid in 2008-2009 cost municipal budget over 18m lei

About 17,500 Chisinau families benefited from nominative compensations for heat last year. At an ordinary meeting of the Chisinau City Hall on Monday, Ion Margineanu, the director of the municipal company “Infocom”, said that the applicants that submitted the necessary documents received compensations during six months, Info-Prim Neo reports. A sum of 18.156 million lei was paid from the municipal budget to 17,497 families with a monthly income lower than 1,450 lei per member, including children. Margineanu said that only eight of the 77 Privatized Dwelling Owners Association and Housebuilding Cooperatives, which prefer to pay for the public utilities without involving “Infocom”, provided information about the payment of compensations. He also said that Moldova-Gaz also expressed readiness to award compensations to families in need. Deputy mayor Vladimir Cotet said that the information for the new heating season should be updated as the financial situation of the applicants could have changed meanwhile. Chisinau Mayor Dorin Chirtoaca demanded that the updating process be simplified so that the applicants present only a statement whereby they ask that they are further paid compensations and assume responsibility if it turns out that the family earns incomes larger than 1,450 lei per member. The mayor said that he is satisfied with the steps taken to award compensations, stressing that if the regulations concerning the payment of compensations had not been adopted, the municipal authorities would have been unable to make the payments. Until the new regulations were adopted, the population paid 233 lei per Gcal of heat, while the real heating charge was 540 lei. The remaining part was covered with money from the municipal budget. The Chisinau administration now pays 40% of the gas bill only for deprived families. As many as 921 families from the municipality of Chisinau received wood and coal to the value of 2.281 million lei from the municipal authorities during the previous heating season.