Imagine you’re a mayor, imagine you’re in your first term and you don’t even know what to do first. You have to build schools, hospitals, roads, sewage, sewage treatment plant, you have a lot of projects and you don’t have enough money, because you can’t do it from the local budget. And the recipe that everyone applies, or, well, most mayors in Romania apply is “let’s write another project and we’ll get grant money”. This is the major problem from my point of view because these funds, whether we are talking about European funds or funds allocated from the government through various programs such as NRRP, as today’s Anghel Saligny, have a number of shortcomings.
The first and most obvious one is uncertainty – you never know whether that project will be approved or not – for various reasons. Whether you are not of the same political color as the government, or your street project is not on the European Commission’s priority list, there are countless and varied reasons why these projects might or might not receive funding. The first major disadvantage is the uncertainty, because you need those streets, the people in your town need to have those streets in good condition, they need to be able to drive on them, they need to have six lanes in each direction, if possible, they need to have parking spaces… And you need them today, not in two years, or whatever, you would prefer to do them today, and all the people in that town would prefer to do them today. But you are uncertain, will the European Commission finance my streets? The answer is no, the European Commission does not fund arterial roads and side streets in the city.
A second major disadvantage is bureaucracy. Projects have to be done in a certain way, projects have to respond to horizontal themes related to non-discrimination, related to equal opportunities, related to digitization, and your project might not be approved because it doesn’t respect the horizontal principles related to equal opportunities.
But let’s say the project is approved, you get funding. Another disadvantage that has been observed over time in the execution and implementation of these major projects is the delays and funding gaps. Delays in the payment of reimbursement claims, or even of some payment claims, and the fact that there is no consistency of a positive cash flow throughout the project and you cannot even make realistic forecasts of a cash-flow over the projects because managing authorities usually have a good habit of delaying payments for various reasons. Either there isn’t enough money in the Ministry of Finance, or it hasn’t been received from the European Commission, etc., etc., etc.
There is another disadvantage, and here at least half of the mayors who are not in their first mandate and who have implemented European projects will agree with me. Corrections. We Romanians are more royalist than the King. After you’ve done a project, and you’ve done it successfully, and you’ve achieved something in your city, the Court of Auditors comes and analyzes your purchases. They analyze the way and the legality of the procedures that you used in public procurement, in awarding contracts and so on, for the realization of the project and you wake up and a smart guy from the Court of Auditors comes and says: “Hey boy, wait a minute, you did not fully respect the principles of transparency in public procurement although you did it according to the manual. There’s always one of these guys who finds a loophole and you wake up and they give you a correction, and not a cheap correction, but a correction of 5%, 10%, 20%. Just imagine, on a 100 million project, what 20% means. That’s 20 million you have to pay back, but from where? You put them in those roads, in that infrastructure project. What are you doing, where are you giving it back from?
