At today's meeting, the chairmen and parliamentary group leaders of coalition parties proceeded to the first harmonization of the legislation under which 14 regions are scheduled to be created in Slovenia. According to the Prime Minister Janez Janša, it is an extremely important and complex project, and Slovenia is embarking on decentralization, i.e. the creation of regions, not only to achieve a more harmonious regional development but also to accelerate it.
PHOTO: Office of the Prime Minister
"The purpose of establishing regions is a faster and more harmonious regional development, and we believe that Slovenia should be decentralized to this end. In other words, that a great deal of competences, which logically belong to the regional level and are now carried out at the national level, should be transferred to the regions. Therefore, the regions have to be appropriately organized and resources should be provided in order to finance their activities", said the Prime Minister.
These are activities relating to regional development, spatial and traffic planning, all activities of regional importance, as well as activities involving the transfer of competences for secondary level education, regional health and social welfare services. To a large extent, they also include the transfer of financial resources accumulated in the national budget for the financing of these activities. "Currently, SIT 370 billion is earmarked for these activities in the national budget. The regions will have their bodies to be elected by direct ballot, regional councils, presidents and perhaps even vice presidents. They will also have a body which will, to a large extent, act as a safeguard aimed at preventing the weaker regional elements, i.e. individual communities, from becoming easily outvoted. It will be a body composed of community mayors, who will probably have the right to veto individual decisions. This structure should be set up at this level for the first time in 2008, simultaneously with National Assembly elections", pointed out the Prime Minister.
Chairmen and parliamentary leaders of coalition parties reached today an agreement that harmonization of all acts relating to the setting up and functioning of regions will be done in cooperation with all parliamentary parties. According to the Prime Minister, it is a project of national importance, which is why the coalition parties wish to achieve a maximum convergence and consensus on solutions which will then be permanently anchored in Slovenia. "With this objective in mind, we devoted more time to harmonizing our positions. In the first stage we will also seek the opinion of all coalition partners after today's coalition meeting, within two weeks' time, to be confirmed by the party bodies and then subjected to broader reconciliation among all parliamentary parties. We expect that both harmonization stages may be completed by the end of November and that we will then be able to submit all four necessary acts to parliamentary procedure by following a normative programme within a formal proceedings before the end of this year. This time schedule will pave the way for relatively thorough preparations for more concrete measures that need to be adopted on administrative level in order to ensure a smooth transition", declared the Prime Minister Janez Janša after the coalition summit meeting.
