Representatives of cities, municipalities and counties agreed, during negotiations with the prime minister, to establish a single national salary scale for local administration, said on Tuesday Dan Carlan, president of the National Union of Municipal and City Employees in Romania (SCOR), which is part of the Columna Trade Union Federation.
"Today's negotiation was a very difficult one. (...) We came out with several problems solved, in the sense that we are no longer talking about the mobility of leading civil servants within the municipal mayoralties, that mechanism through which once every five years, at the discretion of the political factor, the leading civil servants could be changed. We are no longer talking about the evaluation of leading civil servants by a commission from the prefecture, it has nothing to do with the activity that we carry out in the mayoralties at the end of the county. These two things have been eliminated. The meeting began with the hypothesis of a 20% reduction in salaries for those communes and cities, those mayoralties that cannot ensure their salary fund from their own income, only from local taxes and fees, and we came out with the balanced solution of establishing a unitary salary scale at the national level starting with January 1, 2026. And this salary scale cannot contain anything other than the principles of equity and balance that are also found as a milestone in the PNRR and the European Social Charter, that is, the principle of equal work, similar pay," Carlan stated, at the end of discussions with Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan, Minister of Development, Cseke Attila, and Deputy Prime Minister Tánczos Barna.
He added that "it was based on the hypothesis that 75% of mayors are currently unable to secure their staff salaries from local taxes and fees, which does not mean at all that the staff is oversized, but rather that the system of financing administrative-territorial units is deeply flawed."
"I emphasized during the meeting that if 75% of mayors do not secure their salaries from their own income and only 25% can do it, when the state allocates amounts from income tax to balance local budgets, I don't know how it does it, that it gives 5 lei to those 25% who have and gives one leu to those 75% who do not. (...) The meeting began with the hypothesis, with the proposal, to the only family in the budgetary system, namely the local public administration, to apply a 20% sacrifice curve at the beginning of next year. We left with the understanding, with the solution, that for the local public administration a single salary scale will be established at the national level to ensure a balance, to remove the excesses, those extra ones, but to also ensure the subsistence minimum at the bottom, without there being a direct causal link between the apparent problem that 75% do not have the possibility to provide from their own income, because it is an erroneous local administration financing system," the unionist detailed.
Carlan announced that the strike scheduled for Wednesday is postponed until the draft law on public administration reform is finalized.
"On Monday, at 2:00 p.m., we will have a meeting to which we were invited by our minister, the Minister of Development and Public Administration. An opportunity to discuss from the union's perspective the things that still need to be corrected in this law. Tonight I will propose to my colleagues from the SCOR Column Federation and the SCOR National Union that we suspend, not stop, the protest calendar until the next day, after the draft law is published in decisional transparency by the Ministry of Development, that is, until we see which of our proposals have been incorporated into the draft normative act," Cârlan specified.
According to him, the biggest problem at the moment remains the way in which the reduction in the number of positions will be established.
"It is very clear that the number of positions at the local administration level will decrease. Compared to the version that was proposed last week, in the first version of the project, there were many proposals, each associative structure came with proposals today, it will certainly be a different form, which has not yet been discussed. Our proposal is to maintain an element of uniformity in the method of calculating the number of positions. (...) The big problem is that the Government continues to maintain the hypothesis that everything that is collected in addition based on the increase in the amount of taxes and on the basis of coercive instruments will not remain at the local level, it will leave, it will fill the hole from the Government, which is completely inappropriate. You find that three quarters of the mayors are starving, come up with some measures to increase the level of revenues, but you take the same money and "You go and cover the Government's holes," the SCOR chairman also said.
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