THE MUNICIPAL elections campaign may have been slightly overshadowed by the squabbling over the economy and the antics of unions, but candidates were still given ample time to put their views across. They have been guests on television and radio shows almost daily in the last couple of weeks, making all sorts of promises about making us proud, improving our quality of life, undertaking new projects, giving us the town we deserve or making it the cultural capital of Europe.
The metaphysical promises are easier to believe than the promises about making our towns cleaner, safer and prettier, for a very simple reason. To do things requires money, something that is in very short supply at all municipalities. And there will be a bigger shortage of funds next year as the government has cut its cash assistance to local authorities by 13 per cent in the 2012 budget. Where will the money needed to improve citizens’ quality of life come from?
This is a question that none of the candidates has bothered to answer, apart from claiming that funds could be secured from the EU, as if all we had to do was put in an application and the money would flow into municipal coffers. Worse still, all candidates have avoided even mentioning the dire financial situation that all municipalities find themselves in.
Crippled by debts they cannot service and lumbered with bloated payrolls the municipalities are in deep financial trouble, but none of the mayoral candidates has informed us how he or she aimed to deal with the money problems.
According to the latest Auditor-General’s report, at the end of 2010 Nicosia municipality had debts of €70.6 million and Limassol €100 million. In addition to this, 64 per cent of Nicosia’s expenditure in 2010 went on wages and for Limassol it was 50 per cent. In 2009 Nicosia municipality owed €35.3 million to its staff pension fund, while Limassol owed €73 million and neither had been able to make the annual repayment suggested by an actuarial study.
If a business were in such financial difficulties and wanted to hire a new CEO, the first thing shareholders would want to know would be how he or she planned to save the business from bankruptcy. This obviously does not apply to municipal elections, with none of the mayoral candidates feeling obliged to think about let alone speak publicly about finances. We suspect this is because the only solution would be to impose municipal taxes, something that no candidate would dare mention, for obvious reasons.
Candidates are just happy to make the promises they would know – if they read the municipality accounts – could not be delivered.
