The mayor’s office of Larga village of Briceni district opened its doors to present the positive practices used to ensure transparency in the decision-making process and methods of communicating with the villagers. The event was held on the eve of the Transparency Week held on October 13-19, within which 30 mayor’s offices from 17 districts of the country are carrying out activities aimed at bringing the mayor’s offices closer to the people, IPN reports.
“Communication with the people is the most important element for every mayor’s office because everything the local public administration does is possible only with the people’s involvement. That’s why our mayor’s office has several methods of communicating with the residents of the village. I do not want to have monologue in the meeting hall. That’s why I insisted on outfitting the hall so as to predispose the people to a constructive dialogue in the meetings of the Larga local council,” mayor of Larga Radu Urechean said when presenting the meeting hall.
According to the mayor, the meeting hall was equipped during only several months with the assistance of the Joint Integrated Local Development Program (JILDP), which provided 62,000 lei. The mayor’s office contributed 96,000 lei. The meeting hall of the mayor’s office was fully renovated. It was outfitted with a projector and computers connected to the Internet. The equipment allows transmitting online the meetings of the local council and the groups on public procurement. Owing to these changes, a number of economic entities taking part in the public tender contests do not even come to the meetings. They submit the required documents and then watch the meetings from the office.
JILDP community consultant Ghenadie Cojocaru said that after they started to cooperate with Larga village last summer, following a survey carried out at the mayor’s office and the settlement, it was established that the project should center on ensuring transparency in decision-making. Thus, the project to build the institutional capacities of the Larga mayor’s office envisioned the equipment of a hall so as to transmit all the public meetings online.
“Not all the mayor’s offices with which we work showed such openness as the Larga mayor’s office. Not all the mayors have such engineering knowledge as the mayor of Larga. The functionaries of not all the mayor’s offices became actively involved. Only several months ago, this hall was a room with a stove and a stage and it was hard to imagine that it will have such technical possibilities as now. When we launched the cooperation, the mayor’s office had its own website and we thus proposed installing software for broadcasting meetings live through this website,” stated the facilitator.
According to Radu Urechean, the mayor’s office issues monthly the local newspaper “Larga is my home”. “This way we inform the villagers who do not have access to the Internet about the work of the mayor’s office and the life in the community. Over 1,500 of the 5,000 residents of the village have Internet connection and can watch online the meetings at the mayor’s office. The others read the paper. Thus, we manage to inform everyone,” said the mayor.
Asked to what extent Larga is ready for the new public financing system that will start to be applied next year, the mayor said the mayor’s offices with community centers, as Larga, will encounter difficulties as the costs are high and they will get insufficient financing from the state budget based on the new system. “We are thus analyzing the possibility of merging the institutions of the village so as to optimize their work. If we do not cope, we will make other changes. We also intend to increase the local incomes by raising the local taxes by 0.5%,” said Radu Urechean.
The visit to the Larga mayor’s office was made within the Transparency Week that will continue with a number of national and local events. The Transparency Week is launched on October 13 in Sarata Galbena village of Hancesti district, where there will be opened a local radio station.
