The capital city hall cannot pay salaries to about 7,000 employees, including subordinates, because the budget of the capital city hall for 2024 was not approved by PNL and PSD councilors, Nikushor Dan said in an interview with HotNews.ro. The municipality still has 22 million lei in its account, from which it will pay each employee about 25% of the salary until March 11. Failure to approve the budget will also delay the payment of current works and utilities.

• “The impact is this: I checked this morning (Nrjoi), we have 22 million lei in our account. In January we received 500 million from the Ministry of Finance from the quotas broken down by taxes of the citizens of Bucharest, in February we received 400 million, on March 8 we should have received 400-500 million. In subordinate institutions, salaries are about 70 million.
• We have discussed with Economik that for the time being we will pay people 25% of their salaries as long as we have the account. We have several hundred million that we must receive from European funds, which we paid out of our budget in 2023 and which are in various forms of calculation in the Ministry of Finance or in the Ministry of Development, we are also waiting for this money.
• Due to the fact that the budget was not voted, about 7 thousand people do not receive a salary. They will receive only 25% of what we have in the account on March 11, Monday,” Nikushor Dan explained.

According to him, there will be delays with the remaining payments, from electricity for lighting to investments.

We remind you that the capital budget was not adopted, although it was put to a vote twice, because PNL and SDP did not vote. Nikushor Dan no longer has a majority in the General Council after the PNL withdrew its political support in February.

The PNL councilors argued that they are not voting for the budget, as Mayor Nikushor Dan allocated 1 billion lei less for heating and public transport subsidies, that is, two billion instead of three. PNL councilors made an amendment to allocate another 1 billion for the two, but did not specify where the money would be cut.

General Mayor Nikushor Dan explained that at the moment they have to reduce investments in order to put the missing billion in subsidies, considering that the entire subsidy should not be paid at the beginning of the year, but in parts, every month, in the budget it is proposed to leave the grant money until September. The mayor assured that there is no problem not to give funds for subsidies, the necessary sums will come for corrections when the sums received from European funds are repaid.

“The councilors of PNL and PSD are formally right in the sense that in the implementation of 2023 we had 3 billion lei for two subsidies for heating and transport, and in the proposed budget for 2024 we have pledged only 2 billion lei. So, theoretically, we invest 1 billion lei less than we know we will spend. Or, finally, we have experience that we will spend before the end of this year. But I explained to the councilors that we will get more than the budget we have now, about 1.8 billion lei, which are either debt refinancing, or European funds, or an unrealistic assessment by the Ministry of Finance of the taxes that the people of Bucharest will give us. Because if we received 6.2 billion lei from the taxes of the citizens of Bucharest in 2023, it is unrealistic to estimate that we will receive only 5 billion lei in 2024,” Nikušor Dan explained in an interview with HotNews.ro.

• Read also: The budget of the capital’s mayor’s office is still blocked by PNL and SDP / Svobodov citizens asked to allocate an additional billion for subsidies for heating and public utilities, but did not say where the money came from