The wind of change is blowing in the Transylvanian city of Marosvásárhely/Târgu Mureș: The 2021 budget of RON 500 million was accepted in just a couple of hours and with only three amendments in an extraordinary session on Friday. This compares to previous sessions during the Dorin Florea era when many hours of debate and tens of amendments were added to the city budget before approval.
Marosvásárhely councilors gathered on Friday afternoon for an extraordinary session that dealt with only one topic: the Transylvanian city’s budget for 2021. The session was preceded by another meeting held midweek, but that did not produce any visible results, reports Hungarian news portal Székelyhon.
This year, Marosvásárhely’s budget is RON 504,277,113, up roughly 20 percent compared to last year’s budget of RON 448 million, and up from the 2019 budget of RON 327 million.
Claudiu Maior, a key figure in the team led by former mayor Dorin Florea, said publicly that he is not satisfied with the current leadership of the city. Another councilor and member of the Free People’s Party (POL), Radu Bălaș, reminded Mayor Zoltán Soós that
he had promised to reduce the money allocated to salaries
from the city budget by
3 million euros and highlighted that the total cut in salaries is only
RON 3 million this year.
Soós replied that the promised reorganization of directorates will happen, but he also emphasized that the authority cannot leave people without work from one day to the next.
People’s Movement Party (PMP) councilor Radu Pescar compared the 2021 Marosvásárhely budget with those of six other cities and found that
Marosvásárhely has the lowest budget per capita and that spending is focused on running costs
instead of investments.
He also offered up his knowledge to help the city leadership attract investors.
Two out of the three amendments accepted by the city council were formulated by councilor Márton Kelemen (from the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania, or RMDSZ), and both were related to a long-overdue road bypass project. The bypass should ease traffic going through the city but has been on hold for many years. Kelemen communicated that two feasibility studies were needed for this project. His amendments, alongside POL councilor Zsolt László Pápai’s proposal for a feasibility study for a Waldorf school workshop, were accepted by the city council. After that, the 2021 Marosvásárhely budget was voted in. It is now on the table of the Maros/Mures County prefect for a legal check.
Title image: Marosvásárhely/Târgu Mureș Mayor Zoltán Soós. Image credit: Vince Haáz/Székelyhon
