“I believe that mistrust of the authorities is mostly related to the lack of results and non-compliance with pre-election commitments. People no longer have expectations, they no longer believe in what you say, what you will do, but if you respect that, we found that the level of trust increases, and the degree of compliance and civic engagement increases,” said Ilie Bolojan in Tuesday for a management course conference

The former mayor of Oradea (currently the chairman of the Bihor District Council) spoke about his experience in the modernization of the city

• The change of the country is the sum of the changes of communities. It’s true, we were in the west of Romania, which means a geographical advantage.

• We were not a rich county, and we are not now. An important direction was the attraction of capital, because we had neither capital nor jobs, against the background of deindustrialization, which was after the 90s. An important tool was the creation of industrial parks, at the first stage in the municipality of the city of Oradea. We have dozens of hectares, probably at the level of each county building, abandoned, about which the ministries no longer know, full of garbage. Communal services were introduced with European funds, they were given to companies, and we are in a situation where, from 75 thousand employees in 2008, we have more than 95 thousand employees

• The next stage is to expand it in the county, because we have an occupancy level that we can still afford to increase, but from more than 50 km from Oradea, you cannot commute. That is why we are working with the second wave of industrial parks in such a way that the available labor force, which is 80-100 km from Oradea, so as not to completely depopulate the countryside, has a job as close to home as possible.

• We offer the same system through which we identified the locations, we took through European funding, through loans, we invest in their communal services and in their connecting infrastructure, so that there are conditions for investing in these locations as well.

• This has been an important direction and we have achieved quite low unemployment, but we are in the middle income trap zone and we have to see what we can do as far as the authorities allow us to get out of that zone.

• During these years, I worked a lot on infrastructure, a very important area, because private investment follows infrastructure, and a lot was invested through partnerships, through loans, through European funds, we avoided conflicts because we had a partnership with the Ministry of Transport, which had will last several mandates and transport ministers change frequently. I passed everything.

• One of the big things we did, but it’s not very good, we did expropriation. There is a surge in expropriations here, but you can’t build new major infrastructure without expropriation. We got through these things, even if they weren’t popular, with a stable two-thirds majority and plenty of seats that allowed us to break out of cyclical electoral logic.

• Another important issue was the infrastructure part to support the business environment – ​​from intermodal terminals, cargo, etc. These projects are currently being implemented and are being developed in such a way that this infrastructure supports the business sphere.

• Another important direction was highlighting the things that make us different from other cities

• One of the elements of the city’s identity is a part of the historical center, those that have left it. Rehabilitation of buildings in the historical center became an important direction. Here we had a set of measures that included an incentive part, but more importantly, a coercive part produced results. After five years of benefits, benefits, tax benefits, during which nothing happened, only the increase in taxes, unfortunately, had an effect, and only after that the pace of building recovery increased significantly.

• This set of measures has meant that today much of the center is in rehab and has reached the contagion phase where you no longer need to incentivize people, but simply because they want their houses to look good, it rehabs en masse. Thus, the element of identity that attracts tourists, that creates a sense of well-being, quality pedestrian areas, made us a city where you can spend a quality vacation in Romania.

• We had to do some things that the economic environment initially refused to do because they didn’t seem sustainable. We were not a city where the creation of an international school seemed sustainable. We had to go for co-financing and for several years we co-financed the international school and only now, after 4-5 years, it got back on its feet and functions independently.

• We invested in the Aquapark what public institutions do not do, private institutions should do, but since no one had the courage to do it, because the calculations did not work out, we had to do it ourselves, and it turned out to be the right thing, because it was an embryo, from which the private sector has also received confirmation that it is possible and now we have private investment in this regard.

• We have worked and are working to improve suburban, agricultural areas by taxing uncultivated land by 500%, calling on mayors to do this, increasing rural tourism, supporting small local entrepreneurs who produce products, so that the level of employment in rural areas grows quite a lot.

I do not think that we will be able to avoid the disparity between regions

• I don’t think we can significantly reduce the differences between big cities and small towns that tend to depopulate, but of course what the government or local authorities can do is a big connecting infrastructure to reduce the distances between the east and the west of Romania .

• I believe that national policies can be made to encourage good governance to reduce disparities. We are the country with the lowest number of civil servants per capita because we have tried over the years to stimulate the transition from the public sector to the private sector.

• I believe that it is important to stimulate projects and support projects as a government with co-financing of local authorities, because we are quite dispersed today. We allocate funds to many settlements, but, unfortunately, the effectiveness of these investments is not analyzed, and if the question of co-financing arose, then the investments would certainly go to areas that have the potential for development, at the first stage to the metropolis, and then other regions.

• There was no national strategy to guide best practice. The best projects that have been carried out over the years have been to take the best practices of other administrations in Western Europe and apply them to our conditions.