Territorial Reform, Mazniku: Our proposal brings the administrative structure closer to the citizens

The chairman of the Special Committee for Territorial Reform, Arbjan Mazniku, during his speech in the Laws Committee, spoke about the SP proposal for the new territorial division. During his speech, he defended the Socialist Party’s proposal, describing it as a step based on strict technical criteria, facts and analyses by Parliament’s experts.

According to him, the new municipalities will have many times more capacity to exercise their functions.

“The proposal was built on the evidence of the special committee’s report. Although the opposition did not present a report, the experts engaged by Parliament submitted to Parliament a detailed report, based on criteria, facts, numbers and analyses. We built a series of criteria, which are legal requirements that a reform must pass. On them we analysed every opinion that came from the municipalities and the residents, and based on this concept the reform we are proposing today has been built.

The essential element is that it has been left to Parliament. The administrative-territorial division is Parliament’s prerogative. In all cases, the opinion of the residents, the municipal councils and the mayors was obtained, within all legal deadlines. Some of the suggestions have been taken into account. When we start from the argument of merging, most of the territories that are merging have agreed with this reform.

People have been told ‘you will lose representation, you will not be able to be represented’. First, as is already in the Constitutional Court’s decision taken in 2015, what the Constitution requires is that within a territory that functions as a municipality, people have the right to take the decisions themselves. We have a greater assurance mechanism here, in that we give the possibility, through the mechanism of cities, to have proportional representation of the persons who are within that territory, so that they are represented in the respective Municipal Council.

The new municipalities will have many times more capacity to exercise their functions. Nobody has been able to name a service that is being taken away from people. On the contrary, through the creation of the concept of cities, which increases the number to 71 cities under our proposal, in many cases it brings the administrative structure closer to the citizens,” he said.