Политика

A regular meeting of the Municipal Council is scheduled for February 13. Undoubtedly, the greatest interest is waiting for the decision of the councillors to reduce the garbage fee for 2002. The proposal is from 4.5 per mille the fee to be reduced to 3.5 per mille for residential buildings, and for non-residential properties 16 per mille on the tax assessment.
A difficult decision is forthcoming in connection with bringing the funeral activities in the municipality in compliance with the legal requirements. There will probably be debates around the planned transition of the activity to Stroycom and the decision for the municipality to pay the funerals only to socially weak citizens. The financial calculations made are also controversial, and the question of how it will be determined which are socially weak and which are not. It is also important that the councillors make the decision on the proposal that municipal schools should switch to the system of so-called "delegated budgets". This is a new model of financial decentralization in which school leaders acquire rights to secondary spending units by budget means. The system of delegated budgets has already been tried with success in individual municipalities. At the end of last week, members of the Education Committee of the Municipal Council visited Blagoevgrad together with the head of the Humanitarian Policy Directorate M. Vladimirova to see in practice the application of this type of budget management. A huge percentage of the work of the upcoming session is related to property swaps, reallocations from "for landscaping" to "for residential construction", property conversion, etc. It will be decided whether 4 municipal sites in the former PP "V. Goranov” will be rented or sold through a competition. A procedure for lease of municipal agricultural land will also be opened. Tempo