Every day oblast and district centers are confronted with a host of problems, but Kyiv politicians have created a new one: preparing for the parliamentary elections. As usual, city mayors are mostly concerned about the cardinal question of power decentralization. This requires changing the law, which also takes a lot of time. Mykola Tomenko, a guest at a recent meeting of the Mayors’ Club Kyiv and former MP, cheered up the audience, predicting that if Ukraine “follows an optimistic path” (i.e., the elections will be declared transparent and the new MPs quickly form a coalition and cabinet), the Verkhovna Rada’s second session may well end up dealing with the question of local government. In his view, this will take another year or two.
Meanwhile, city fathers throughout Ukraine are tackling problems on their own. According to the chairman of the Mayors’ Club, Volodymyr Udovenko, the impression is that Ukrainian society consists of parliamentarians, the president’s staff, the Prosecutor- General’s Office, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the mass media, and nothing else is happening in Ukraine. In reality, there is an extraordinary range of problems with which city, town, and village mayors are all too familiar — from building children’s playgrounds and repairing roads to combating HIV/AIDS.
The main point raised by the mayors is that people in the provinces are not at all interested in politics: they are facing real problems every day. The roundtable participants agreed that, in order to form other values in society and adopt a responsible attitude to work, people should start from small things right now, for example, tidying courtyards and balconies, and repairing roofs and sewers. This way every individual can make a contribution to civic life, and, to quote Larysa Ivshyna, honorary member of the Mayors’ Club, “the community will begin to revive.”
Volodymyr CHAIKA, Mayor of Mykolaiv
“We must immediately introduce amendments to the Constitution regarding the laws of local self-government. Today, local government bodies act as buffers between all the branches of power. So, if no constitutional amendments are passed, we will lose these local government bodies as such, and people will no longer believe that local authorities can do anything for them. The fact that today people are turning to the cabinet or the president shows their mistrust of local government bodies. Our authority exists on paper only: what is it good for if we are strapped for cash?
“Another problem is the Bureau of Technical Inventory. All its powers have now been transferred to the public utilities and justice ministries. What should an individual do? Should they apply to the Ministry of Justice to sell an apartment or to the Ministry of Public Utilities? Why all this red tape if all problems can be solved automatically — on the spot.
“There is a problem with registering businesses and organizations. What is going on today? We are hindered from registering them here, solving all problems within the space of a day, and then handing the register over to state registration bodies. But there may be a glitch in the computer over there, and you end up waiting a week over here. There are so many problems like this.
“Let’s talk about bids and purchases. The situation is just awful! Suppose I am responsible for a public road and a public-utility enterprise. I have to invite bids, using money that I have earned and give the funds to the state so that the one who has won the bid will repair my roads. We have to go through a complicated procedure of bidding, which affects everyone adversely.
“There is so much talk about changing the territorial layout; all eyes are on Poland, but it took Poland 7 years and 13 billion dollars to do this, and when somebody says that, if you merge 3 or 5 poor village councils they will get rich, he is wrong because there are no funds for improvements. Poland did not carry out an administrative reform before it set up its infrastructure and communications and held a referendum about who would merge with whom. But in our country we have begun talking about this reform again.”
Oleksandr ISYP, Mayor of Kobeliaky, Poltava oblast:
“This is my third term in office, and I have been working for a total of 10 years. Every term brings more problems. Small cities, like Kobeliaky, with a population of fewer than 50,000 people, are facing serious problems that the central authorities are tackling very incompetently and inconsistently. The main problems are funding, cooperating with district and regional branches of power, forming the budget and the taxation system, etc. They can only be solved in the aggregate at the lowest level. For example, in Kobeliaky we have successfully solved the problem of heating supply: we switched from centralized to individual heating, although the higher bosses forbade us to do this. We received a lot of letters. We were inspected by the Auditing Department and the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine. But we did it in spite of everything, much to the satisfaction of ordinary people because heating is no longer a problem in the city. If you always meet the people and explain the problem-solving mechanism in easy-to-grasp terms to them, you will stand a chance of being understood and supported.
“For instance, we decided to centralize garbage collection, to use containers for this purpose. We will have to learn how to divide the garbage. The public must decide for itself how to do this: people can separate their litter at home and throw it into different containers (which will be cheaper for them) or this can be done at a storage place by hired workers. I think we will do this within a year or two.
“As for cooperating with the central government, I am sure that the government should stop turning a blind eye to the people; it should say bluntly that what lays the foundation of society is the local urban and rural government rather than the Verkhovna Rada, the cabinet, or even the president. And if we are given not only the powers that we supposedly have by law but also the possibility of solving these problems, the public will be satisfied and there will be money to repair roads, roofs, etc. We must truly -not just on paper — observe the European Charter that we ratified 10 years ago, as well as the local government law.”
Volodymyr UDOVENKO, Mayor of Slavutych, Kyiv oblast:
“I would suggest the following principles of local government reform:
1. Local self-government in conjunction with decentralized national governance.
2. Local democracy is the basis of overall democracy.
3. Local self-government, as a powerful administrative resource, should comply with the provisions of the European Charter of Local Self-Government.
4. Adhering to the principle of subsidiarity is the main component of decentralized local government.
5. A territorial or regional community should wield segregated powers.
Our territorial communities are still in the making. An imperfect election system, which has created a gulf between politicians and the public even at the local level, is nevertheless prompting people to seek new models for running their city. This mainly applies to socially active individuals. Naturally, you cannot establish a viable pattern of local self-government during one term in office. Just look at Western countries: it took them many years to create effective and full-fledged local governments, so we too need time. All we have to understand is that there are states with a centralized and a decentralized form of government. People enjoy better living standards under a decentralized system, and well-developed local self-government can furnish a greater array of higher-quality services. The point is that the local authorities — whether in a city or a village — have face-to- face contact with the public.”
