Representatives of the Social Democratic Party (PSD) have unveiled in recent weeks two distinct scenarios for wide-reaching territorial reform, which would help curtail public spending as Romania struggles to remain under its targeted deficit of 6.2%.
Dragoș Benea, PSD vice-president and the party’s coordinator for territorial reform, said on Monday, November 9, after a party meeting, that the PSD is working on several scenarios for merging small localities.
One of the scenarios envisages merging all communes with fewer than 3,000 inhabitants.
“Almost 1,700 communes have populations of up to 3,000 inhabitants. They will have to merge,” Benea said at a press conference.
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He also announced that small towns whose populations have fallen below the legal threshold of 10,000 inhabitants will be merged or downgraded to commune status.
As a result, according to the PSD representatives, between 15,000 and 18,000 local elected officials (mayors, deputy mayors, and local councillors) would lose their positions after 2028 if the reform is passed.
Territorial reform has been seen as a political hot potato in Romania, with no party wanting to connect its name to it. PSD, which is backed by an entrenched network of local representatives, has discouraged past attempts at reform by the Liberal-led Ilie Bolojan government. The party now expects the territorial-administrative changes to be an uphill battle.
“All mayors will oppose it, all parties will lose, and the PSD will lose the most. I am not naive. But this reform is necessary,” Benea said.
Another reform proposal was put forward by the Ministry of Development, headed by another PSD member, Ștefan Stoica. The ministry’s proposal centers on voluntary mergers between localities with fewer than 1,500 inhabitants.
A specific draft for the mergers is expected next week, and PSD vice-president Gabriel Zetea said that the implementation will take into consideration several criteria, such as population, connectivity, proximity to another potential commune center, access to social services, the available roads, the distance from other communities, own-source revenues, the cost-benefit analysis of revenue collected per resident, and the cost of local administration.
At the same time, mergers will be accompanied by investment programs proposed by the Ministry of Development to prepare the localities that are to be merged for their new commune centers. There will also be tax incentives for residents, according to Digi24.
Under the current legislation in Romania, a referendum is required to carry out voluntary mergers. Mayors of small communes have four months to decide whether to merge their localities with neighboring ones.
Until March, mergers could be carried out voluntarily, with residents’ approval through a referendum, to benefit from tax exemptions and priority for investments. After this deadline, some localities are expected to be merged compulsorily, without a local vote.
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