- “ZOCG states that the possibility for municipalities to celebrate Liberation Day as their municipal holiday should not be abolished.”
“The Union of Municipalities of Montenegro (ZOCG) submitted to the Ministry of Public Administration its opinion on the revised Draft Law on Local Self-Government, published at the end of last year.”
“It is a systemic law that has been in preparation for several years and should provide the basis for improving the decentralization of the system of government, as one of the standards of the European Union.”
“The Draft Law prescribes the duty of state administration bodies, in the process of preparing laws and other regulations governing the status, rights, and obligations of local self-government, to ensure the participation of representatives of local self-government units, and the suggestion of the Union of Municipalities is that the same obligation should also be prescribed for the members of the Parliament of Montenegro.”
– The Draft prescribes numerous mechanisms of control by the central authorities over the local ones and the taking of measures due to non-compliance with the law, including the most radical ones. At the same time, the essential reasons that cause such a situation are not being considered, and these are very often contained in an inadequate normative framework, a lack of understanding of the needs of local self-government, and the non-acceptance of initiatives or opinions of the association that offer appropriate solutions. We believe that the proposed provisions would put an end to this practice, contribute to the faster development of municipalities, and bring Montenegro closer to the European Union – it is stated in the ZOCG opinion.
The Union submitted a total of 65 objections, that is, suggestions, and through a large number of them the Union of Municipalities insists that local self-governments be given full freedom to organize their administrations in the way that suits them. A significant number of objections relate to the provisions prescribing the conditions for obtaining and losing city status, bearing in mind that the proposal of the new law introduces a polytypic system of local self-government that distinguishes between cities and municipalities. Municipalities that acquire city status, as envisaged, will be able to perform certain tasks in the field of social and child protection, as well as tasks in the field of preschool education and primary health care as legally transferred tasks, that is, as tasks entrusted by a Government regulation.
The Union considers that a municipality’s capacity to provide services to the residents of surrounding municipalities should not be one of the conditions for acquiring city status, because this cannot be proven through documents. Instead, a condition should be prescribed regarding an appropriate number and qualification structure of employees for performing decentralized tasks, which can be easily proven in the procedure for acquiring city status.
It is also suggested that the paragraph excluding the acquisition of city status for those municipalities that have tax debt should be deleted, because the majority of municipalities have such debt, and it is mainly caused by decades of unsuitable policies of the central authorities.
– The solutions in this law should be stimulative and contribute to the development of local self-government, and not the opposite, as is the case with the condition regarding tax debt. The policy of decentralization is moving in the direction of transforming municipalities into cities as holders of a greater number of competences and fiscal decentralization that will strengthen them financially in the future, and therefore this and other laws should create appropriate conditions for them to provide quality services to citizens in accordance with the EU acquis – it is stated in the ZOCG opinion.
It was assessed that the provision in the Draft Law on the loss of city status if the criteria for acquiring it are not met for three years is unconstitutional, because it grossly violates the autonomy of municipalities; moreover, only the fulfillment of criteria relating to population size, revenues, and tax debts to the state can realistically be questioned, and these largely depend on the policies of the central, rather than local, authorities.
For the Union, the provisions defining the possibility of establishing city municipalities are also problematic, so it points out that this possibility should either be abolished or city municipalities should be recognized in the initial provisions of the law as forms of exercising local self-government, while their bodies, administrative authorities, elections, financing, and other matters should at the same time be determined by special laws.
In the submitted opinion, it is also proposed to delete the provision that grants the Government the right to suspend the execution of acts of the municipal assembly adopted at a session that was convened or held contrary to the prescribed procedure. The reason stated is the risk of certain disproportionate harm to municipalities and citizens by contesting significant assembly acts solely due to procedural deficiencies in convening and conducting the session.
The Union of Municipalities opposes the provision that limits local self-governments to choosing exclusively the date of their establishment as the day of their holiday. They state that the holidays that municipalities have determined so far should not be changed, but that the possibility should remain for the holiday to fall on an important historical date, as is currently the case in a large number of local self-governments that celebrate Liberation Day in the Second World War.
