The crisis could lower the number of communes in Romania

• Lowering the number of communes by merging them - a possible solution for balancing the local budget, proposed in a draft law for intended to balance the local budgets, proposed in a legislative draft bill for the territorial office

After lowering our revenues, the crisis could leave us with a smaller number of towns.

A sizeable part of the communes could be merged in order to reduce the number of local public administrations.

This scenario is already included in a draft law that provides a territorial reorganization of Romania, initiated by PD-L senator, Nicolae Dobra.

He argues the need to lower the number of communes is justified, since many of them were created simply because of political ambitions, or they no longer fit the demographic criteria, and following the drop in the number of birth rates and the migration of the population, the current number of inhabitants would qualify as villages, instead of communes.

The senator also argues that the number of employees in the local mayoralties and councils needs to be cut anyway because of the crisis.

Senator Nicolae Dobra explained: "The basic premise of the plan is to increase the relevance of the local authorities, by transferring as many local projections as possible over to the local authorities, which is possible by merging settlements together, in order to increase the number of taxpayers for a local administration. (...) In our opinion the territorial reorganization within the bounds of the current Constitution can be made by lowering the number of communes".

The technical solution proposed by the senator provides first of all that any village which is part of a commune should have the right to attach itself to a neighboring commune at any time its inhabitants would desire it, via consultation or referendum.

The communes which would see their population drop below 3,000 following the spin-off of one or more of their villages, would be dissolved, and any remaining villages would be merged with other communes.

The MP said that this operation was prevented by the ambitions of many of the local officials, but he says that this is a hurdle that needs to be overcome, by holding referendums by which the inhabitants of the villages should decide what is best for their future: "This needs to happen, even if we were to go from one village to the next in order to lobby for the need for this territorial reorganization, because if it doesn"t happen, then their money will simply go towards paying wages of the employees in the public sector, without any effect on their welfare".

The MP also says that taxes can not be lowered without cutting expenses first: "The future means lower taxes for citizens, which also means cutting expenses, but this will not be possible if this administrative attrition continues and is not reversed, by merging towns together, to create stronger entities and with a higher potential to express their autonomy, according to the local law".

The proposal of the MP also provides the preservation of the current number of counties and of their structure. According to statistics, Romania holds a number of over 2160 communes which comprise around 13,090 villages.