‘The territorial reform’: a reform, or simply a re-division?

By Mentor Kikia

The Mayor of Tirana has joined the discussion on the territorial reform through a package of thoughts and proposals addressed to the Parliamentary Commission for Territorial Reform. The reform being drafted creates a new unit, the Rinas Unit, with several villages of Kruja Municipality, including the airport area, which will join Tirana.

Erion Veliaj opposes this idea, because there was no prior process of study and consultation. “Before Tirana Municipality gives a full and argued opinion, it must be provided with a special assessment of the population and territory affected, the competences and services that will be transferred, the assets and liabilities, the impact on local revenues and expenditures, the personnel, territorial planning and the continuity of public services,” Veliaj writes, while requesting the suspension of the reform process.

The Territorial Reform should essentially have addressed the problems observed from the 2014 division, in order to correct them. But the whole public discussion has focused on only one point: the number of local units, that is, the geographical map. This also led to reactions from residents in the municipalities being merged, which did not fundamentally express a need to improve services, but a ‘civic ego’ — to be a municipality in their own right and not be annexed by larger municipalities.

In fact, the ‘map of services’ should have been drawn first, and only then the geographical one. That is why I find Veliaj’s proposal to suspend the process appropriate, not only for Tirana’s sake, but nationwide as well.

A reform is the ‘Law on Local Government’, the competences and budgets of the units that provide services — not the division or merging of units in themselves.