The introduction of performance indicators in municipalities for the benefit of the citizens was announced by the Deputy Minister of the Interior Vivi Charalambogianni at the start of the two-day information session organized by the Central Union of Municipalities of Greece (KEDE) in collaboration with the Hellenic Association of Local Development and Self-Government (EETAA) in Thessaloniki for the new mayors of Eastern Macedonia and Thrace and Central and Western Macedonia.

“With an ever-expanding legal arsenal, you take on your duties. However, in order to have convincing answers to your citizens, you must first be sure inside the Municipality that you are doing well. That is why the Ministry of the Interior promotes the measurement of the impact of your efforts through the measurement indicators” underlined the Deputy Minister of the Interior.

“From the new year, as he pointed out, the mayors who assume duties in their office will have to find comparable data on how much the municipality recycles, or how high or low the municipal fees are in relation to the services offered. There will be performance indicators, which are established for the benefit of the citizens,” emphasized Mrs. Charalambogianni.

He also mentioned that within 2024 the new Local Government Code is being prepared, which brings together the legislative framework for the structure and operation of Local Government which is currently scattered in around 200 laws and that at the beginning of the new year 1,213 new recruitments will be announced in the Municipal sector Police.

The Deputy Minister of the Interior underlined that the Ministry of the Interior is promoting the unification and modernization of the legislative framework for public and local government personnel and is preparing a new code of administrative procedures, a complete single regulatory text, which reflects the basic principles, rules and processes governing the ways in which citizens engage with a modern state with an emphasis on digital governance.

“The five-year term that begins for the Local Government Organizations in a few days is completely different from the other, previous terms and especially from the one immediately before when experiments and ideologies of the central authority led this institution to an unprecedented crisis without the practical possibility of implementing the program, the which the citizens voted for because of simple proportionality. With one word, they led him to paralysis” underlined the Deputy Minister of the Interior.

“The government examined the pathologies of the then institutional framework of OTAs and then took legislative initiatives having completed a wide cycle of consultation and honest constructive dialogue with the Self-Government, he added.

“At the same time, all these years, we, the government and the administration, have learned valuable lessons from the management of unprecedented crises, all these years that put the Self-Government to the test, such as the climate and energy crisis, but also the pandemic” he pointed out.

At the Ministry of the Interior, we are well aware and want to highlight the primary role of local authorities in the progress of the country. For the institutional shielding of the public and for the OTAs, we therefore have to demonstrate a rich legislative work from 2019, which continues in the next four years”, he pointed out.

“The image of each community, the image of our Municipalities and Regions brings together the image of the country and the course of the country. And no matter how good, qualitative, developmental the policy implemented by the central administration is, if the operation of the Municipal administrations is not correspondingly qualitative, developmental, the result of the policy will not be what we want for the citizen” emphasized the Deputy Minister of the Interior (Macedonia – Thrace Sector) Stathis Konstantinidis.

In some issues related to the self-governing function, we wanted to give greater initiative, greater autonomy to the Local Government and at the same time to strengthen the resources available, the financial tools. At the same time we wanted to rationalize human resource distortions. In all these areas, issues affecting the operation of local authorities have been resolved or have been put on the right track, said Mr. Konstantinidis.

The Ministry of Macedonia – Thrace will be next to the newly elected in the Local Self-Government with open doors. I have the express mandate from Prime Minister Konstantinos Mitsotakis to monitor and strengthen the routing of the projects in the three Regions, Central Macedonia, Western Macedonia and Eastern Macedonia and Thrace. In this direction we will have constant cooperation in order to achieve the best coordination and diffusion of development throughout the region.