Mayors oppose planned closing of local birth registers

Prague, Jan 3 (CTK) - Representatives of the Czech Association of Towns and Municipalities yesterday handed their petition against the closing of building offices and registers of births, deaths and marriages in many small municipalities, planned within the public administration reform.

The association's head Dan Jiranek said the reform should be based on getting the public administration closer to people.

"Just the opposite is happening," Jiranek said.

The planned closure of more than a thousand of registers of births, deaths and marriages would make life more difficult for people from small municipalities, he pointed out.

Jiranek said the planned closure of building offices would affect people even more.

A marriage usually takes place once in a person's life, but to obtain a building permit one needs to take a lot of steps that need to be taken repeatedly and various documents must be presented step by step," he said.

He said the public administration reform has no concept.

The Interior Ministry expects to annually save 53 million crowns by closing two-thirds of over 600 building offices in municipalities and more than 1000 registers of births, deaths and marriages. The reform is to take effect in 2015.

Jiranek said he believes these steps would save no money.

The Czech Republic has 6246 municipalities at present, 618 of them have a building office, 1230 have a register of births, deaths and marriages, 3910 of them can verify signatures and official documents and 5717 offer Czech Point services, including abstracts from the land register or the criminal record.

($1=19.023 crowns)