Local public administration Law

Deputies yesterday completed the report on local public administration Law, which has been with the Parliament for more than one year and is to be tackled in Plenum during this autumn’s session. Together with local budgets’ Law and the Law on the civil servant status, this Law is aimed at completing the legal framework required for decentralisation of local public administration.

At the same time, it includes several provisions concerning the rights of minorities, such as the possibility to use the mother tongue within public administration systems in the areas where they exceed 20% of the population. Opposition representatives are not satisfied though with these provisions, deeming them as “restrictive” and liable to hurt the interests of the majority population. Specialised commissions within the Chamber of Deputies did not bring essential changes to the draft Law submitted by Government and voted by the Senate.

First, several amendments were approved for the number of members in the local council. Thus, in localities with 200,001-400,000 inhabitants, the number of councilors was settled at 21, against 19 as voted by Senators, while for localities with more than 400,000 inhabitants, 25 councilors were approved, that is four more than initially established.

Deputies also agreed that the decisions for approval of cross-border cooperation agreements were to be adopted with the vote of at least two thirds from the number of councilors in duty, clarifying thus the item concerning collaboration in frontier areas.