MfD: Financial management in regions to hopefully improve

Prague, Oct 16 (CTK) - The situation in Czech regions will not hopefully be worse after the recent elections than in the past four-year-term because the coffers are empty and they will not offer too many opportunities to suspiciously draw money from them, Vladimir Paral writes in Mlada fronta Dnes.

He writes that the regions' debts grew by a half under the Social Democrats (CSSD) who controlled all 13 regions in the past four years and there were lots of scandals in drawing EU money.

The regions handed out some 750 million crowns when illegally returning fees to patients in regional hospitals and their pharmacies instead of investing in transport infrastructure, for instance, Paral writes.

Yet, the Social Democrats again won in nine regions in the weekend elections, Paral writes, but he says it should be the financial management of the regions was also influenced by objective factors.

The tax yields that belong to the regions decreased and the unfavourable economic development affected not only the state, but also regional and local budgets, Paral writes.

He says the regions have also created new values thanks to money from the European Union as well subsidies from the state budget.

The fact that the national government has been right-wing and the regions were controlled by the left has not much affected the state treasury's generosity, Paral writes.

On the other hand, the governors were not always that generous, which was particularly obvious in Central Bohemia under the former governor David Rath, who has been remanded in custody on suspicion of corruption since May, Paral writes.

He writes that the region made huge investment in Rath's home town of Hostivice while the northern parts of the region with right-wing mayors were often waiting in vain for the repair of long-time broken roads.

On the whole, the Social Democrat governors quite quickly came to understand that they will have to backpedal on their ideas of generous spending money, Paral writes.

He gives as an example the mass paying of fees for patients in regional hospitals that did not last even two years and it is clear that the new left-wing politicians will not radically raise spending either, not because the regional government would not want to, but because there are no more resources for this.

Besides, running into debt is no longer as easy as it was in 2008 after the CSSD gained control of the regions for the first time, Paral writes.

He says the regions will again run into problems in the health care field, in which they were unable to fulfil their 2008 election promises to raise doctors' salaries in regional hospitals, which was partially due to the regions' bad financial management, partially to objective reasons.

This time the candidates promised to preserve all hospitals, all wards, all beds. However, it is beyond doubt that the bed capacity of regional hospitals is too big and that it will have to be reduced, Paral writes.

The decision on how many of them will be preserved will not be made by the left-wing leaders, but by health insurance companies that will say with whom they will sign contracts and under what conditions, Paral writes.

The left-wing majorities in regions will now be deciding on whether they will be fighting for the preservation of the current network that will be offering worse and worse care, or whether they will accept the centralisation of specialist care in a smaller number of facilities whose capacity will be better exploited and that will be better staffed and equipped, Paral writes.

They will have to deal with what was not solved in the past four years, Paral writes.

Turning to "gifts" from the European Union, Paral writes that it will now show whether the regions financed with them projects that develop the business potential in regions, or whether they used them for monuments like Rath's Bustehrad chateau.

Such monuments would require big overhead means from the regional treasuries that will not have them. Therefore they will be gradually falling into a state of dilapidation becoming witnesses to the onslaughts of right-left regional predators, Paral writes.

The flow of money from the EU will be thinning and there will be less and less money to be handed out, Paral writes.

He says this is another reason why the regions will have to count every crown much more carefully now than before irrespective of from which political party their governors may come.

($1=19.291 crowns)