Part of the budget of the Metropolitan Municipality this year will be distributed according to the ideas of the citizens and after voting by the people themselves. The methodology for the submission and determination of the projects is to be voted on at the meeting of the Metropolitan Municipal Council on Thursday.
The civil budget is divided into two. A total of BGN 500,000 for projects that affect the entire city, and up to BGN 200,000 for each of the city’s 24 districts. According to the city-wide methodology, up to 2 projects will be able to be financed. The reason is that the minimum amount for one idea is BGN 250,000. At the district level – the minimum amount for a project is BGN 20,000, which makes up to 10 ideas.
It is very likely that none of the approved proposals will be a reality by the end of the year. The reason is that the rules for submitting projects and voting are still being approved. After that, work projects must be made, public procurements announced, contractors contracted, and the work done. According to the rules of the municipality, the maximum period for the implementation of each project is 15 months. An extension is possible, but with a maximum of 3 months.
How will ideas be submitted?
Committees will be established for the preliminary review of the projects, as well as for monitoring their selection and implementation. One to the Capital Municipality for city-wide initiatives and one to the regional administrations. They will review the documents for the submitted ideas. And those can be offered by any citizen over 16 years of age.
After the preview, all ideas will be published on the page of an as-yet-undeveloped application – Digital Sofia. Before that, the regional administrations, as well as the Metropolitan Municipality, will help to evaluate the ideas and supplement the documents.
Voting at current address
Voting both at the city-wide level and at the district level will take place in one place – on the not yet developed Digital Sofia portal. In order to participate in the voting, people must be 18 years of age and have an address registration in Sofia, and for regional initiatives – in the relevant region.
From the explanations of the Deputy Mayor for Finance Ivan Vasilev before the Finance Committee of the Municipal Council, it became clear that the voting will be by electronic signature, through the not yet existing application or on tablets in the regional administrations against an ID card. In this way, it will also be established where the current address of the relevant person is.
According to Ivan Vasilev, this could motivate people who are legally in one area, but actually live in another, to update their address registrations in order to participate in the voting for the projects that directly affect them.
People will be able to vote for one proposal under the city-wide civic budget and for several proposals under the regional budget, but the sum of the draft budgets for these projects must not exceed BGN 200,000.
Each citizen has the right to vote only once for each category, but can support more than one project for each category.
Sofia has previously given money to civic projects through the “Sofia Chooses” initiative. And with it, citizens proposed and voted for specific investment proposals. The first winning project, financed with over BGN 1 million, was for the repair of school toilets. He was slightly ahead of the idea of reorganizing the traffic along “Patriarch Evtimii” Blvd. in the area of the NDK, which the Metropolitan Municipality revived these days.
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