From the day the majority of the members of the Parliamentary Committee on Internal Affairs settled on the number of municipalities to be created under the Local Government reform, the Minister of the Interior has not stopped emphasising the supposed need to merge the Municipality of Geroskipou with the Municipality of Paphos. Indeed, in an attempt to block the proposal to establish a municipality in eastern Paphos, he is trying to persuade the parliamentary parties and to sway public opinion by citing figures contained in his ministry’s study, figures which we conclusively proved to be incorrect in a letter we sent to the responsible ministry about a year ago.
We will address three points that are the constant refrain of the Minister of the Interior:
- At every opportunity, he claims that merging Geroskipou with Paphos would halve the cost of providing services. Unfortunately, the Minister of the Interior insists on citing erroneous figures from the study. Even if we were to accept the study as a reliable source of information and conclusions, what it states still does not vindicate the Minister: on page 136 it notes that, from a merger of the Municipality of Paphos and the Municipality of Geroskipou, “the annual per-capita expenditure would amount to 601 Euro, a figure clearly improved compared with Geroskipou’s current performance of 722.7 Euro of expenditure per resident.” Consequently, the cost of providing services is not halved, as the Minister claims, but reduced by 17%. He even reaches the arbitrary conclusion that residents would be burdened with higher fees. Of course, the residents of Geroskipou know very well that their Municipality’s fees are lower than those of the Municipality of Paphos, and indeed lower than those of most municipalities!
In any case, despite the attempt, the study failed to conceal the capacity of the Municipality of Geroskipou to meet the scenario of merging with communities in eastern Paphos. In fact, it admits that the surplus of the new municipality that would result from this scenario would approach 1.2 million euro annually (the same as it estimates the surplus would be if the merger were carried out with the Municipality of Paphos!). It is baffling why the study makes selective use of certain figures while concealing others. And most importantly, in evaluating the scenarios, no account is taken of the municipalities’ loans, their debts to the various funds and their debts to third parties, with all that this implies for the conclusions the study reaches.
Ultimately, even through the study itself, it is demonstrated that a merger of the Municipality of Geroskipou with neighbouring communities upholds and secures the main objectives the study sets for mergers.
- According to the Minister of the Interior, increasing the number of municipalities jeopardises the viability of the reform (with the Municipality of Geroskipou as the prime example)! Yet the study commissioned by the Ministry itself provides no evidence for this! The municipalities being added had essentially been examined as scenarios by the consultant and had been characterised as “viable.” Moreover, the Ministry’s final plan includes proposals that were not examined by the study – and therefore were not subjected to its criteria, among them that of viability. In the end, 10 of the 17 municipalities proposed by the Ministry have not been examined as scenarios in the study!
Again, from the Ministry’s own study, it is demonstrated that the main component of the Municipality of Eastern Paphos, the Municipality of Geroskipou – the one that, supposedly, would lead local government to collapse:
- ranks 10th in revenue among all 30 municipalities.
- ranks 8th in primary surplus among all municipalities.
- has an exceptionally high ratio of own revenue to total revenue (79.7%) compared with the average of 63.6% – 5th among all municipalities.
- exceeds the average per-capita revenue per resident (€764 against €660 – 6th among all municipalities).
- its payroll expenditure amounts to just 34% of total expenditure and is well below the average (41.3%).
- The Minister of the Interior points to the cooperation that exists between the two municipalities to justify their merger. In other words, because we cooperate we must also merge? But we cooperate with the neighbouring communities too! The Minister invokes the two municipalities’ joint proposal for integrated territorial development in the context of pursuing European funds. By this logic, in Limassol, where this proposal was submitted by all seven municipalities, there should be only one municipality.
We call on the Minister of the Interior to put an end to this systematic targeting of the Municipality of Geroskipou and to focus on the substance of the reform, from which we have begun to drift away, evidently because of fixations and expediency.
