Prague, Oct 19 (CTK) – The effort to give the Czech regions the biggest possible autonomy has gone too far not only in the Olomouc Region, whose governor Jiri Rozboril has been accused of corruption, but all of them need stricter control, David Klimes writes in daily Hospodarske noviny (HN) Monday.
Two high-ranking police and an influential businessman were taken into custody after an extensive police raid in the Olomouc Region last week. Rozboril (Social Democrats, CSSD) refused to comply with Prime Minister and CSSD head Bohuslav Sobotka’s call for him to resign, claiming that he is innocent.
Klimes writes that Olomouc is not the sole out of the 14 Czech regions that has problems. He mentions David Rath, former Central Bohemia governor, who was given an 8.5 year prison sentence for corruption earlier this year. It has not yet been valid.
There do not simply exist only isolated villains, such as Rath or Rozboril, but the whole architecture of regions is defective in many respects, Klimes writes and adds that the regions have too a big autonomy and insufficient control.
The creation of regions was embedded in the constitution in the early 1990s, when the Czech Republic became one of the two successor states to former Czechoslovakia, the other being Slovakia, Klimes writes.
He writes that it took some time before the self-rule entities became reality in 2000. A lot of problems, such as the division of health care, education and transport between individual regions, had to be settled before the regions acquired huge powers.
The regional governors became important politicians and the regional elections, held once in four years, gradually developed into referenda on the national government in the middle of its four-year mandate, Klimes writes.
He writes that it is only good that lawmakers are now debating a draft amendment extending the powers of the Supreme Audit (NKU) to also embrace the control of regions.
It is unbelievable that the NKU does not have power to control the regions’ finances that have increased up to a total of 422 billion crowns annually now, Klimes writes.
What is more important is the proposed control of regional firms that often gear a wide range of the regional elites’ interests, he writes and adds that Rozboril’s case has lent the final spur to the amending of the NKU law.
Klimes writes that the political bargaining of the 1990s eventually resulted in the creation of higher self-rule administrative units some of which are very small. The Karlovy Vary Region has a mere 310,000 inhabitants, while some 10.5 million people live in the whole country, he adds.
This leads regions to form the Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS) to reach EU subsidies, which makes the relevant regional politicians strike various barters, Klimes writes.
He writes that politicians, instead of controlling one another and putting up opposition to suspicious subsidies in the Olomouc Region, for instance, the regional system forces them to form detrimental cartels of power, Klimes writes.
Another reason why the regions need a stronger supervision is the development of their debts that is one of the biggest horrors of the contemporary public administration.
Their total debt of 1.3 billion crowns in 2003 rose to 27.6 billion crowns at the end of last year. Even though this may be blamed on the forthcoming regional election in 2016, the truth is that the west Bohemian Plzen Region has had no debt, whether it was ruled by the rightist Civic Democrats (ODS), or the leftist Social Democrats (CSSD), Klimes writes.
Unfortunately, it is the sole such region in the country, he adds.
Rozboril’s Olomouc region is the opposite extreme. Its debt stands at 4.6 billion crowns, which is almost one billion crowns more than its annual revenues, Klimes writes.
He writes that similarly, Rath’s Central Bohemia Region had no problems running into huge debts, but its revenues were not at least so low as the Olomouc Region’s.
Even though the regional architecture has many defects, it is not beyond repair. The regions and mainly regional firms need regular controls by the NKU, the euro subsidies a transparent decision-making and regional finances need debt caps, which would dramatically narrow the governors’ space for solo actions, Klimes writes.
