Interior Ministry to Send Mayors Letter with Questions on Future of Local Gov't

Bratislava, April 9 (TASR) - The Interior Ministry will send a digital letter with five questions to mayors on Wednesday in an effort to find out, for instance, whether they would agree to holding separate municipal elections and regional elections, Interior Minister Matus Sutaj Estok and State Secretary Michal Kalinak (both Voice-SD) announced at a press conference on the same day. The aim of the questions is to seek feedback on planned changes and make decisions only after a comprehensive discussion with representatives of local authorities has taken place. "Combined elections did not result in cost savings, and voter-turnout in municipal elections decreased by about 2.5 percent. To make matters worse, the elections lost their originality," said Kalinak. According to him, combining the elections has made it harder for voters to navigate the election process and contributed to lower participation. He believes that after the elections were combined, few people even knew who was running for what post and what they were offering voters. "Elections must be understandable in order to be trustworthy, and it turned out that this has not been the case," he added. The ministry also wants to know whether local authorities think systematic support for inter-municipal cooperation is necessary. "Another question concerns whether they see a benefit in having the ministry run the education system," explained Kalinak. In addition, the ministry is interested in the mayors' opinions on the introduction of an 'inflation adjustment mechanism'. "If taxes or fees are increased only by the rate of inflation, then it should be automatic without the need to adjust the general binding regulations," added Kalinak. Mayors will also be asked whether they would give the ministry a mandate to advocate for an 'existence minimum', meaning that the ministry would push for not allowing financial resources for local authorities to fall below the level of the previous year. "We want to get feedback so that we can make decisions about local authorities that impact them, along with them," said Sutaj Estok. The Interior Minister also hinted at the possibility of launching a discussion on reducing the number of self-governing regions or optimising their powers. "Let's discuss whether the powers of the self-governing regions are sufficient to justify having eight of them in existence. After all, you have eight large offices, eight groups of bureaucrats. I'm not opposed to a debate on whether it wouldn't make more sense to have only three self-governing regions," he added. The state secretary clarified that the discussion isn't about abolishing district offices, but about optimising the smallest ('third-level') district offices and possibly integrating them with municipal offices. mf/df