Heat bills shock dwellers: Chisinau Council chair

One third of the people calling the hotline of the Chisinau Municipal Council (CMC) say they cannot obtain heat compensations. The people receive bills they cannot afford paying, CMC chairman Eduard Musuc told a news conference Friday, Info-Prim Neo reports. “The heat bills have shocked the population. There are pensioners receiving pensions of 500-600 lei, who paid over one thousand lei,” Musuc said. “The bill would have been 40% less, if the councilors adopted, on December 23, a proposal of the Socialist Democratic faction to grant the heat compensations automatically to the vulnerable groups from Chisinau,” Musuc said. He is the secretary of the PSD. Less than one per cent of the beneficiaries got compensations for the November-December period, because of red tape, he said. Compared to the similar period of last year, when 117 million lei were payed off, only 460,000 lei were paid, he added, specifying that 180 million lei were earmarked in the 2009 municipal budget. “Why should we make thousands of citizens to gather tens of documents, if a municipal company as Infocom, jointly with other directions, can offer a database and the compensations may be granted on its basis?” Musuc asked. According to him, a possible consequence of not paying the bills is Termocom heat supplier not being able to pay its debts to power plants and Moldovagaz. “This can jeopardize the heat supply in the municipality,” Musuc said. The PSD plans to ask the CMC to reconsider the draft decision of the faction concerning the automatic disbursement of compensations. The PSD councilors will insist that every councilor votes nominally. The draft decision envisages a number of categories as pensioners receiving smaller pensions than the subsistence minimum, the participants in wars, victims of political reprisals, teachers, public servants, unemployed.