Chisinau Council faction leaders acknowledge municipality can't afford paying for citizens' heating

The Regulation of the Chisinau Municipal Council (CMC) on giving nominal compensations for heating comes to replace the present mechanism when the local authority compensates for the heat charge for all the Chisinau dwellers. Some CMC factions say the mechanism is good and functional in general. Other factions state the regulation cannot be enforced. All the faction leaders have recognized the municipality does not have the necessary money for this initiative, Info-Prim Neo reports. “The payment can be done in stages,” says [Alexandru Roman, a representative of the Communists faction], adding the money gathers systematically into the municipal budget. The councilor says the municipality can afford compensating 100% of the heating expenses of the vulnerable groups, as established by the Regulation. Alexandru Roman also assesses as exaggerated the calculations made by the Finance Direction as to the cost of applying the regulation and says they probably hide political interests. {/The PCRM faction leader, Svetlana Popa, asked to be called later but did not pick up the receiver then – e.n./} [The leader of the Liberal faction, Corina Fusu,] has accused the CMC majority – PCRM, PPCD, PSD and PUM – of modifying the initial version of the regulation , “in order to make the City Hall's structures insolvent”. “They do it in such away as to later accuse the general mayor of lacking management skills,” Corina Fusu says. She says the regulation is to become functional, only if changes are adopted, including concerning the gauge of the compensations. “The regulation has illegalities, since it violates the law on social insurances, adopted by the Parliament, which reads clearly that this area should be dealt with by Social Assistance Directions, not by the district offices, which are entitled unjustly by the CMC to deal with this issue,” Corina Fusu added. [The chairman of the AMN faction, Pavel Caba,] has said the regulation was voted because a system to help the genuinely poor groups should have been adopted. “I would not say there are interests. They should now be left aside, and all should focus on helping the people,” Pavel Caba stated. When asked to say his position as to the possibilities of financial coverage of the project, the Moldova Noastra Alliance faction leader has said it is already the prerogative of general mayor Dorin Chirtoaca and of the local executive entity. [Alexandru Tanase, the leader of the PLDM faction], thinks the biggest problem is including the dwellers from suburbs into the list of beneficiaries, although there are local authorities in their localities. “If they have resources, let them pay from their own budgets,” Alexandru Tanase suggested. He showed himself dissatisfied that mayor Dorin Chirtoaca presented the regulation “5 minutes before being set up for debates.” “We had to face the circumstances. The mayor asked, we voted for the regulation. Dorin Chirtoaca did not come with an exact figure and solution, and the Communists profited from that,” Tanase says. “What we have now is a regulation implying some one billion lei and no clear enforcement methodology. To enforce it within two weeks only is unreal and there is no financial coverage,” said the leader of the Chisinau Liberal-Democratic councilors. Tanase argued his faction voting to raise from 40% to 100% the degree of compensating the heat charge for the poor groups by the fact that “the bills would have been bigger than before and some Chisinau residents could not afford paying so big amounts of money.” The regulation proposed by Dorin Chirtoaca had faults, says [the chairman of the Social-Democratic factions, Emil Gutu.] “We tried to liquidate some of those drawbacks during one day and I think we managed to do so. We made it better than it was”, the councilor said. “I am not so satisfied with the regulation, but with the fact that we managed to adopt it after a year of beating about the bush,” Emil Gutu said. The councilor suggests there is financial coverage to enforce the regulation – 180 million lei. “The general mayor executed the budget mistakenly and payed that money to Termocom, and not to help the vulnerable groups. All he has to do is to fix this mistake, if he still can. It's not our business. We earmarked that money in the very beginning,” the leader of the Chisinau Social-Democrats said. The same opinion is shared by [the chairman of the PPCD faction, Alexandru Corduneanu], who says the CMC “did not change the budget”, and the fact that those 180 million lei are not available any longer “is already the problem of the competence and legality of the mayor”. According to Corduneanu, the draft decision was voted “following the insistence of the mayor and of the Liberal faction, but also because the councilors have been asking for it for one year”. “For the Christian-Democrats, the most important is the fact that the people who can afford will not benefit unjustly from aid from the municipality,” Corduneanu underlined. Although having supported the document, [the chairman of the PUM faction, Oleg Oniscenco], has stated “neither the regulation, nor the idea of enforcing it are real”. “We voted for it to show we support the vulnerable groups,” he said. The councilor accuses a number of officials, including the capital's mayor, of using the regulation as an electoral tool. The Regulation on granting nominal compensations to vulnerable groups from Chisinau initially provided that the municipality would cover for 40% of the expenditures for heating 18 sq. m. of dwelling space for each family member, if the total income of a family does not exceed the existence minimum (some 1,300 lei). Later the CMC voted for raising the coverage degree to 100%. According to the Finance Direction, the expenses of enforcing the regulation reach some 1 billion lei. Mayor Dorin Chirtoaca announced he would ask to modify the regulation. “No matter how luring is the 100% compensation, we should go our feet on earth. We cannot assume more commitment than we can carry out. One can state that the subway train is to built in Chisinau,” the general mayor stated.