Ruling Party: 99.9% Of Romanian Mayors Appreciate Their Share Of The 2019 Budget

In a post on its official Facebook page, PSD supported comments made by party leader Liviu Dragnea, who said that local communities will have their largest budget in Romania’s history this year, and accused critics of being “driven by political stakes”.

“We understand the political stakes which drive them when they criticize the Government, but lying to the citizens who voted them is unacceptable. 99.9% of Romanian mayors appreciate the resulting budget, as was stated in a message sent to the prime minister by the Association of Romanian Communes,” the party wrote.

The chairman of Romania’s ruling Social Democrat Party (PSD) announced on Wednesday that local authorities will receive “their largest budget in Romanian history”, of about RON77 billion, amid criticism received from municipality mayors on the lack of debate surrounding the budget.

In what he deemed “a win-win situation for local authorities”, Dragnea announced in a post on his Facebook page that local communities will receive “almost half of the entire state budget”, about RON77 billion, will keep all revenue from the income tax of their citizens and that each county would have a budget of at least RON400 per citizen, up from the previous RON250 per citizen.

Dragnea’s announcement was made while a delegation of Romanian municipalities’ mayors was attending talks with Prime Minister Viorica Dancila at the Government’s headquarters, amid discontent over the lack of debate regarding the state budget for 2019 and the plan for it to have a number of spending commitments passed from the executive to local authorities.

Bucharest Mayor Gabriela Firea announced before the meeting that the Government had proposed earlier in the day, during an informal meeting, a reduction of the city’s budget by about EUR70-80 million compared to last year, which she says would block key infrastructure projects and the purchase of hundreds of new buses.

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