“The municipal council is unlikely to have time to approve this year’s budget before April 12, when the meeting ends according to the rules of procedure,” says MAN party councillor Kornel Pynthä. – There are too many issues to be resolved before then, as the meeting has been postponed many times due to lack of quorum”.
Besides, as explained in the City Hall, the current year’s budget has been withdrawn so that the Finance Department could adjust it by excluding the revenue item that was included in the sanitary levy. And only after changes in the structure of local fees, the city authorities will be able to submit to the council a corrected version of the document for voting in the first reading. And that procedure also requires time.
Obstacle to budget approval
Although the amount of the sanitation fee was initially included in Chisinau’s budget for the current year, Mayor Ion Ceban two weeks ago proposed to the councilors to vote for the 2026 budget without it. Only to remove the blockage when approving the budget.
“I asked to exclude the sanitary levy from the draft of local taxes for 2026,” the mayor said in his Telegram channel. – On the initiative of the executive today, the levy was removed because it became an obstacle to the approval of local tax and budget projects by councilors.
As a result, the local levy bill was approved by municipal councilors.”
“Ten lei to keep the city clean”
Nevertheless, Chisinau Mayor Ion Ceban does not think it is the right decision. The levy is too small to need to be eliminated. “It is 10 lei per month that goes to keep the city clean and support the labor of people who dedicate themselves to this work,” he wrote. – At the same time, today we pay twice as much for a liter of gasoline and diesel fuel.”
In the end, the councillors approved the abolition of the levy of 120 lei per year, which provided the municipal budget with 40 million lei in revenues per year.
In general, as Deputy Mayor Olesia Pshenicki said during the meeting of the muncipal council, the rates of local fees, with a few exceptions, were indexed by 4.67%, in line with the inflation rate recorded in the previous year.
According to the draft budget of the capital’s municipality, the local fees for 2026 are planned to amount to 526.7 million lei. This is a 35% increase compared to the previous year.
