How much money the state saves with redundancies in local authorities

The local authorities have started to work on the new organisational charts in order to meet the norms set by an emergency ordinance, which modifies the law of public finance, and which was published in the Official Gazette last week.
According to calculations of the Ministry of Administration and Interior, the savings achieved by making over 53,000 redundant will amount to 1.5 billion RON by the end of the year.
The Government modified the law of local public finance, forcing local authorities to cut personnel, which upset certain mayors. The response of Arad’s mayor Gheorghe Falca, prepared since before the ordinance was passed, is revealing: Vladescu (Romanian Finance Minister i.e.) doesn’t decide what I do in Arad! Sorin Oprescu, mayor of Bucharest, says in turn: I cannot cut personnel, while the mayor of Timisoara, Gheorghe Ciuhandu, says all local authorities are given the same treatment, disregarding the fact that a city like Timisoara, for instance, with 400,000 inhabitants, has got theatres and cultural establishments that other cities do not, which means it needs more personnel.