Dorin Chirtoaca: 2008 will seem a happy year compared with 2009 in terms of incomes and expenses

“For the first in the recent history of Chisinau, the 2009 budget is smaller and no extra-incomes are foreseen,” stated general mayor Dorin Chirtoaca. He asked his subalterns to draft two activity plans for the coming year: a simple one, and a plan “of emergency, to overcome the obstacles because of under-financing Chisinau municipality,” Info-Prim Neo reports. “If it has been hard till now, and the city hall works with its accounts frozen, let's see how we're going to work in 2009, when even more interesting innovations may appear,” he told the City Hall's sitting on Monday. The mayor made the statements after deputy mayor Mihai Furtuna had presented the 2009 budget, which will have 1.590 billion lei, and a deficit of 60 million. It will be be 100 million lei less than the 2008 budget. According to the mayor the situation bears no comparison with the one from the last years, where the prices were smaller, and the subsidies for the inhabitants' heating were not so big. The situation “could have been corrected in case the Parliamsnt modified the 2009 draft budget not to deprive Chisinau from the incomes recorded by citizens,” Chirtoaca said. Another version would be drafting and submitting projects to get financing from good neighborhood partnerships, from cooperating with cities from Romania and Ukraine. The finances deputy director, Valentina Vazdautan, has announced the municipality has lost the opportunity to gain 21 million lei, but there are incomes from privatizations. According to vice mayor Furtuna, the main reasons for the small incomes in 2009 are “regulating the formation of the municipality's budget through the Law on the country's budget, and establishing the 'zero' coefficient on the income tax on entrepreneurship.” Another possibility to gain additional incomes would be, according to Mihai Furtuna, “additional sources from selling certain goods and from reorganizing municipal enterprises and by reviewing the status of some joint stock companies.”