On Friday, the factions will begin negotiating Nagykanizsa’s budget for this year. It’s hard to finish on February 24, as this year’s Mayor’s Draft contains quite a few items that are unlikely to be passed by the EVE faction. Not to mention, the 2022 budget has been amended four times by city leaders, the last time due to refunds from Sberbank. Then, after Jacint Horvath’s amendment, the previously voted-on budget for city corporations was reinstated.
In November 2022, Via received 30 million HUF, 10 million from Pool, 10 million also from Media House, and 5 each from Rehab and Városfejszált. This was assessed by Szilard Szabó, leader of the Fidesz faction, as follows: Jesus came to business leaders earlier. Since the changes in 2019, local representatives of the ruling party no longer care about city companies. Except for the arena, of course. This claim was already revealed in September 2022, since the mayor was going to solve the 622 million downtime caused by the energy crisis by closing the media house of Kanizsa and the city developer, and not providing additional money for the rehab or swimming pool, thus eliminating 170 people in unemployment. . At the meeting held at that time, Laszlo Balogh said: Before his social sensitivity was taken into account, he was thinking institutionally.
This mentality is also felt in this year’s draft, as the proposal puts Mediahaza on the brink of liquidation, but also sensitively affects Rehab and Via. Staying with ourselves: The mayor ordered us 50 million HUF, this amount was 120 million HUF last year. But even this figure of 120 million is 22 million less than the support in 2017 and 2018. “We obviously guessed that Laszlo Balogh wants to punish the city corporations this year as well,” said Jacint Horvath, deputy leader of the EVE faction. He wants to achieve this by not providing the support that the municipality provided last year, and therefore we did not even calculate the inflation rate this year of 20 percent, even on the most modest numbers. The Media House finds itself in a difficult situation, but the state is not adequately compensating workers there for the expected increase either. Since the mayor’s plan did not take this into account, layoffs would be inevitable. The amount allocated for road maintenance and park maintenance in Kaniza Road is also much less than the inflation rate. We see all this, but at the same time we have to say that there is not much room for maneuver, because the state imposes restrictions on local governments.
So the goal may be to maintain last year’s level, but to achieve this, each line must increase by at least 20 percent. According to Jacint Horvath, this is almost impossible with government decisions. – It is very difficult to talk about the budget in such a way that the state continues to withdraw HUF 200 million in vehicle tax revenues that we usually spend on renovating roads. This has been going on for the fourth year. Therefore, it is difficult to implement road improvements, but it is also difficult to support sports. Although we decided to allocate 200 million annually to sports, the budget now provides 100 million, but this can only be achieved if we are able to accomplish the mandatory tasks. Culture is also in a very difficult situation, since last year we managed to write 10 million Hungarian forints for the cultural line, this year it is 5. We have seen for years that the Orbán government is still working to take revenge on the municipalities because of the 2019 elections.
Jacint Horvath predicted regarding Friday’s meeting that since there is unlimited opportunity to talk about the budget item, he does not expect a short discussion, but at the same time he hopes that everyone will be able to stay on the budget topic. the offer.
Giorgi Mikko Barat
