O problema mare a fiecarui primar

I stopped by the primaria, or town hall, last week to talk with the mayor. I'm helping my village try to get a new volunteer this fall with a different speciality, and even though a second volunteer is a long shot, my meeting with the mayor gave me a chance to talk with him for about 45 minutes.

Petru Rosculet is a physically imposing hulk of a village mayor, standing just under six feet tall but with a thick body, broad shoulders and huge hands that bring his weight to around 230 pounds. His face is rounded and his eyes appear slightly slanted, so he looks more Mongolian than Moldovan. He has moved up through the village over the decades, beginning as a teacher at the school, then becoming the school's principal. Then, near the end of the '90s, he was appointed as vice-mayor. In 2003, the previous mayor passed on the title to Petru, and he was then elected by the villages of Mereseni and Sarata Mereseni later in the same year. His term goes until 2007.

Last year, Petru's wife, the school principal at the time, left to work in Italy. Not only does he have two villages to run (Sarata Mereseni is a small Russian-speaking village that shares a mayor, school system and other facilities with Mereseni), but he has to do it with his wife temporarily in another country. Petru drums up enthusiasm when he sees one of his constituents or is in a meeting, but in the in-between moments, he seems much more tired and worn-out than a man in his 50s should be.

Petru has overseen the creation of the new parent-teacher association in Mereseni that will fund and is slowly bringing natural gas pipelines into the village to improve heating and cooking possibilities in homes and at the school. But compared to what he had promised in 2003, he has failed; running water has not been restored to the village, the roads haven't improved, and there are no new streetlights to improve safety at night.

The problem, Petru told me last week, is the tax system that the federal government enacted in 2003. Before 2003, the village collected taxes and gave the county and federal government what was due to them; the mayor's office kept a lot of the tax money and could use it to the mayor's discretion. But since 2003, the federal government has taken all of the village's tax money and then distributed it back down to counties and villages.

This system clearly hurts Moldovan villages, since mayors now have to request back the money that was collected from their villages. Money in Chisinau is much more likely to go to issues that Chisinau politicians find pressing, and properly funding village schools and water distribution systems are not first and foremost in the mind of politicians who send their children to private city schools and can turn on a faucet in their house and instantly get water.

"I've talked to the prime-minister, [Vasile] Tarlev, a few times," Petru said. "And I asked him, 'Why isn't there enough money going to the villages? Don't we pay taxes? Aren't we Moldovan citizens just as much as someone living in Chisinau?'"

Moldovan mayors like Petru are trying desperately to get funds into their villages just in order to pay for heating the schools and pay the salaries of public workers, let alone improve the village. Thankfully, progress might be on the horizon with the 2007 federal budget. Petru told me that two possible improvements in tax law might come:

First, the tax collection system would go back to the pre-2003 method, where villages pass to the county and federal governments only what is due to them and keep local finances inside the village. This should give mayors much more control over how funds are used.

Second, the federal government will take over the burden of paying teachers. This will alleviate some financial stress on village budgets and will hopefully result in teachers being paid in a more timely manner.

Lucia Candu at Public Policy Watch has this optimistic news (full post here):

Finally, the legislation is soon to be improved, and the major shortcomings will be eliminated. The Parliament has already adopted the draft new law on local public finances in the first reading. I have read the new piece of legislation, and, in my opinion, it contains important provisions that can lead to an increased financial autonomy of local governments.

Until then, progress in villages, where nearly half of Moldovans live, will be slow. And mayors like Petru Rosculet will have to keep trying to make something out of nothing.