Romania’s teritorial-administrative reform reaches Parliament / MP Tudor Benga has submitted a bill establishing 12 counties, thresholds of 10,000 inhabitants for towns and 5,000 for communes

MP Tudor Benga announced that on Wednesday he tabled in Parliament a bill for the administrative reorganization of the country, which establishes 12 counties, thresholds of 10,000 inhabitants for towns, and 5,000 for communes.

„Today, I introduced a draft law on administrative-territorial reform into the legislative circuit, specifically a vision comprising three central points of this extremely thorny subject: the merger of counties, the minimum population thresholds for communes and towns, and access to public services in the localities where town halls would be merged,” wrote Tudor Benga on his Facebook page.

The MEP says that this is a very sensitive subject that the whole political class is running away from „and especially the PSD-PNL-UDMR coalition that keeps the country ‘baronized’ („local barons” is a term used to describe regional influential political bosses in Romanian politics-translator’s note) by starting from the excessive administrative fragmentation of Romania”.

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„And precisely because the current coalition is running away from the parliamentary debate on all the major issues of state reform, I think it is necessary to bring these issues into the legislative circuit in order to see the exact positions of the CES (The Parliament Economic and Social Council – translator’s note) and the CL (Parliament’s Legislative Council- translator’s note) and the Government and the parties and all the institutional actors involved. The vision that I propose is based on the imperative need to reduce the administrative fragmentation of the country and the related budgetary waste, to make the absorption of European funds more efficient, and to have municipalities capable of self-sustaining and delivering quality public services to citizens without having to be forever capped in hand at the door of the government and party leaders”, underlines Benga.

MEP Tudor Benga says he has proposed a vision of county amalgamation that respects the traditional identities of the country’s ten great historical regions, but also the human, economic, and logistical flows of today’s Romania. „I will come back in more detail to the logic of the thresholds (5,000 municipalities and 10,000 cities) and the merging of counties (12 in number) in the coming days, but as I have said many times, I believe that Romania cannot fulfill its development potential without a profound reform of the state, and the administrative-territorial reform is one of the most important”, concludes the MEP.

Background. The Romanian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (CCIR) and several employers organizations with hundreds of members are calling on the authorities to reorganize the country’s territorial-administrative structure in order to reduce bureaucracy. The main measures called for are:

• reduction in the number of counties from 41 (plus Bucharest) to 15;
• redefining the notion of a commune as a locality with at least 5,000 inhabitants;
• redefinition of a town as a locality with at least 10,000 inhabitants;
• all deconcentrated public institutions must be grouped under this new administrative form.

Translated