Chirtoaca’s First 100 Days as Mayor of Chisinau. Info-Prim Neo Review, PART III

Observing the democratic society’s tradition of 100 days, Info-Prim Neo News Agency carries out a series of analysis of the performance of Chisinau administration designated after the last local elections. The first and second parts of the review described the steps taken by the new Mayor General of Chisinau Dorin Chirtoaca matching his intentions and capacities in the post held. From the same perspective, we will examine the mayor’s shaped relations with the subordinate municipal functionaries and with the central administration. It seems important to examine these two aspects interdependently. [Never-ending staff dilemma] The new mayor correctly behaved towards the subordinate functionaries, especially the heads of municipal divisions, showing that he knows the law that provides them with the right to continue their work after the election campaigns. He behaved like a civilized man and did not follow the example of his predecessors, who, as interims, hastened every time to change the staff, appointing selected people to head the main divisions at the instruction of the central administration or according to the principle of personal loyalty. They brought their people, their relatives, their friends. As if they came for an unlimited period. Afterwards, all the old staff members dismissed in the most barbaric way were reinstated in posts by the court. It was the municipal budget and, respectively, the tax-paying citizen that covered the damages of hundreds of thousand lei. At a certain moment, the new mayor announced his intention to start investigations to establish who of the old heads is to blame for the losses sustained by the budget, but no result was achieved yet. It is not even known if these investigations were started. Dorin Chirtoaca announced from the very beginning that he will not fire the personnel and that all the persons that do their jobs professionally will remain to work. He set a number of criteria: attitude towards the needs of the citizens; capacity to skilfully work out documents; discipline at work; preparation of weekly progress reports that should be presented to him personally etc. It is true that the mayor has never made any reference to these reports, probably because he does not have time to read them, not speaking about proficiently assessing and systematizing them. It seems that his gesture of goodwill did not work. The employees either did not believe in the sincerity of his declarations, knowing that every new mayor dismisses at least somebody, or they also heard of certain blacklists and white-lists drawn up according to political criteria. The first reshuffling in the heath division, public utilities and other divisions come to confirm, at least partially, the accuracy of the rumours. It is true that the employees have reasons to worry as many of them had been engaged in the election campaign supporting the former interim mayor Veaceslav Iordan, opponent of the incumbent mayor Dorin Chirtoaca. A part of the functionaries became municipal councillors representing the Communist Party. The others did not, but their names had been present in the lists of the Communist Party or they were active supporters of it. Some of them worked openly and zealously, while the others had been forced to work and worked less assiduously. This way or another, the meeting hall continues to give the impression of a war theatre with two distinct camps. There is the mayors’ camp and the functionaries’ camp whose composition is not yet very clear. This feeling arises not because rather many people from the hall venture to contradict the mayor or defy him in a topic or another, fact that had not happened for about ten years and was not tolerated during the Soviet period. In different conditions, the situation could be described as healthy, productive even. The impression of tacit confrontation arises because many times the mayor does not find support for his initiatives, which he considers of major importance and which could help him assert himself. Rather often, his subordinates provide reasons why one thing or another cannot be done, but they do not offer solutions. The activities without finality described in the previous part of the Info-Prim Neo analysis come to prove this. At this stage, we can speak about an opposition against the new mayor put up by the functionaries, a kind of corporative solidarity. If not dealt with, this phenomenon can become dangerous for the state of affairs in the capital city. Not obligatorily, the functionaries can be accused of ill will. If we ignore the political elements mentioned, we can speak about certain contradictions between the two camps. On the one hand, the mayor is motivated by the natural will to change the things to the better as soon as possible. On the other hand, the functionaries are driven by their instinct to preserve the situation so that it does not worsen, what is not at all simple in the present situation. The mayor did not make many efforts to bring the people closer to him and make them allies. The formation of a majority alliance in the City Council can serve as a relevant example. Certain separate case of employing staff can also be relevant. The fact that the former secretary of the Chisinau Municipal Council Vladimir Sarban was transferred to work for Centru district office is more a loss for the mayor than an acquisition. No other secretary will give the mayor the same juridical, financial and moral certitude as Sarban. [War or Peace] If the mayor does not build up a strong team with good, experienced and liberal functionaries that will support him, the things in Chisinau can get worse rather soon. This can also happen because the adversary side, which has been the central administration for Chisinau administration for many years, knows how to work with the personnel. A relevant example is the appointment by the Government of the former heads of the municipal legal and public utilities divisions, Ghenadie Glushchenco and Mihai Solcan, as heads of organizations that exercise control over the City Hall. Another part of experienced and loyal functionaries that are now neglected could fell tempted to pass to the other camp. The brainstorming or discrediting of the process of constituting the mayor’s team is stimulated by the representatives of the central administration in the local administration. These are representatives of the authorities with double subordination with the police coming first on this list. In particular, the behaviour of the head of the municipal traffic police Ion Vozian is close to defiant if not impudent. The mayor could not make him give details about the accident in which the president’s car was allegedly involved or about the accident in which a young fire-fighter on duty died hit by the car of a policeman supposedly under the influence of alcohol. He was slow to fulfil the instructions to ease the traffic in downtown. Instead of providing the necessary data, the head of the traffic police, who is in charge of traffic, transport and roads, gave the mayor a piece of advice: to deal with more important issues as, for instance, the supply of heat in the municipality and the sweeping in Chisinau. He said this in public, in the presence of dozens of municipal functionaries and many video cameras, some of which expressed a special interest. The head of the municipal police Iacob Gumenita seems to play the same role, but in a cleverer way. Gumenita did not want to reveal the results of the investigation into the death of the fire-fighter, but at the next meeting he presented an ultimatum-report to the mayor. The report said that if the City Hall did not transfer a certain sum of money, the police cars would not work from the next day. This reminds of the “war” epopee against the City Hall with the massive involvement of the police, admitted personally by President Voronin, dating from the mayoralty of Serafim Urecheanu. The serving head of the municipal police Petru Corduneanu came personally with the portable microphone in his hand to record the news conference where the investigator of Urecheanu, Grigore Gorea, was to make sensational revelations about the pressure exerted by top state officials. He looked like the most trustworthy executor of a superior order. For sure, he did not like his mission, but the orders must be obeyed. The ban on the sale of beer in the Great National Assembly Square on the Language Day, the verbal altercations over the coincidence of the Wine Day and City Day are other examples of the uninterrupted or resumed war in whose atmosphere the new mayor Dorin Chirtoaca started to work. [The next part of the Info-Prim Neo review “Chirtoaca’s First 100 Days as Mayor of Chisinau” will describe the mayor’s relations with the political parties and the factions in the Chisinau Municipal Council.]