Municipal property to be rented out through public tendering

Draft decisions on granting temporary use of several underground facilities submitted on Tuesday to the Chisinau City Council (CMC) for approval didn’t collect the required number of votes. The city councillors instructed the Transport and Communication Ways Direction to prepare new drafts for the facilities in question which will have to pass through public tendering procedures in order to be rented out, Info-Prim Neo reports. At the start of the meeting, Chisinau’s acting deputy prosecutor Vitalie Apostol denounced the practice of letting municipal property by means of CMC decisions, and not through public tendering, as required by the legislation, including by City Council regulations. Vitalie Apostol cited the case of a firm owned by a former high-ranked City Hall official, who managed to obtain 15 land plots measuring 8 ha overall. According to Apostol, all these decisions have been challenged by the prosecutor’s office and some of them even annulled by courts. “We all know that the local authorities owe huge debts, yet they think they can afford to bypass public tenders and let slip an important source of income these tenders may provide”, said the prosecutor, adding that all the arbitrary decisions to sell or lease public property would be further investigated and challenged. During the debates on the lease of the respective underground facilities, councillor Oleg Cernei of the Moldova Noastra Alliance (AMN) faction agreed with the prosecutor on the need to hold public tenders. The proposal was backed by other councillors, who noted that the rental agreements with the economic entities currently occupying that facilities are about to expire. So, the municipality will no longer have contractual obligations to them, even if some investments have been made. AMN councillor Alexandru Robu has remarked that one of the draft decisions submitted for consideration proposed a monthly price of 27.5 lei (about 1.68 euro) per square metre, while the average daily rental price at the markets in the city exceeds 30 lei/m3. During the debates, Communist councillor Valeri Pavlov complained about the inefficiency in using the access roads near the rented facilities. He insisted that for the future the rental agreements for facilities located in underground passage ways should compel the tenants to keep the adjacent territory clean, including by removing snow and ice in the winter.