More local roads repaired at expense of doubling transfers from budget to mayoralties in Moldova

Chisinau, 26 July /MOLDPRES/ - More local roads started being repaired this summer, after the government had increased, through the fiscal policy, the allocations to local budgets through the collection of the tax on roads’ use. While till last year, the settlements were receiving 50 per cent of all collections, starting from 2022, all sums collected, i.e. twice as much as in 2021, go to budgets of the mayoralties.   

The change made some mayoralties start the repairs of larger roads, which they had not afforded in the past. This was the case, for instance, for the mayoralty and local council of the Slobozia Mare village, southern Cahul district, which started the reconstruction of the road of access to the Beleu Lake, a strategic tourist destination in the southern region, placed on the administrative area of this settlement, the government’s communication and protocol department has reported.   

A local councilor, headmaster of the Mihai Eminescu lyceum, Elena Garnet, said that, especially during the pandemic, the Beleu Lake had been visited by a lot of people, who were discontented with the quality of the road. Also, the reconstruction of the access road is part of a roadmap for 2019-2025 of the strategic economic development of the Slobozia Mare village. Therefore, after consultations with the community, the local council ruled that the reconstruction was a priority. It submitted the file and got financing of four million lei (about 200,000 euros) within the European Union’s EU4Moldova: Focal Regions project.      

The sum planned for this year, due to reach the local public administrations from all over Moldova, through the full allocation of the collections from the payment of the roads’ use tax, is of 868 million lei, the Finance Ministry said. The only condition is that the local administrations use this money only for the maintenance or repair of roads and during the entire year. The combining of this financing with other ones is allowed too, just as it was made in Slobozia Mare. ‘’We encourage the use of these resources as efficiently as possible. When there are also other projects dealing with roads’ infrastructure, which bring surplus value for the development of settlements and it is necessary to attract also other actors for this, we welcome such a concentration of resources on a single project,’’ Finance Minister Dumitru Budianschi said.     

Photo: Government