Petridis: Mergers are announced soon

The Minister of Interior, Konstantinos Petridis, characterized as extremely important the current decision of the General Assembly of the Union of Municipalities, both for the approval of the draft for the mergers of Municipalities, and for the non-conduct of local referendums for proposed mergers.

In a statement, Mr. Petridis said that following this decision, the government will soon announce its own geographical proposal for which local authorities are proposed to be merged into the new entities and this proposal will be incorporated in the bill which is already in the Legal Service for legislative elaboration and then it will be submitted to the Parliament.

He called on the local authorities, which are in consultation with each other, to submit their views in the coming days, as several local authorities have already done, so that they can be taken into account in the Ministry's proposal, together with the study results and objective merger criteria. which have been agreed from the beginning with the Association of Municipalities.

"Today's decision is extremely important in the effort to modernize the state because without a strong local government we can not talk about a modern state," said Mr. Petridis in a statement to KYPE, adding that the decision is the culmination of a titanic effort that we started together with the Union of Municipalities not to reform the local self-government but to move from a system of co-government to a real system of local self-government ".

"To put words into practice and create new, strong and effective entities that can meet the modern needs of society, independent of the central state," he added.

Mr. Petridis also noted that all this time "we worked quietly with the Union of Municipalities, we had dozens of meetings and touched on all issues, the responsibilities that local authorities must have, the resources needed to be financially independent, but also the issue of controls and administrative autonomy ”.

"We have touched on all these issues that have never been touched on before. The obvious was also understood. "The current fragmentation is not in line with strong European local communities," he said, adding that he himself acknowledged that unification alone could not be the answer.

Mr. Petridis also welcomed the decision of the vast majority of the General Assembly not to hold local referendums, pointing out "the great difficulty of this decision since often the local years prevail over rationality."

"But it was clear," he continued, "that if local referendum reform in dozens of municipalities and communities were to be effectively vetoed, then this could be an easy excuse and way out for all of us, but it would act as a Trojan horse for reform since the decision of a small local authority which could be taken with local criteria will be able to condemn the whole project for the region ".

As he notes, the democratic process to be a decision of responsibility must be undertaken by the democratically elected government and the democratically elected Parliament.

Concluding, Mr. Petridis thanked again the Union of Municipalities for the very good cooperation and the difficult decisions on a complex issue, which demonstrates the determination of the representatives of the local community who live their daily problems to change things, the Legal Service. and the Commissioner for Legislation working to complete the legislative review of the bill as soon as possible.

Source: philenews