There is money! Is it worth fighting for?

The first decisions of the Volyn Oblast Council, in which the majority is held by the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc, actively supported by Volyn residents, have nothing to do with improving the lives of fellow countrymen. More precisely, they improve the lives of only some of them, in particular, the head of the oblast council, Anatoliy Hrytsiuk, to whose official salary 90 percent will be added monthly "for the special nature of work" and 60 percent in bonuses. According to the Western Information Corporation: the maintenance of the head of the oblast council and his deputies will cost Volyn taxpayers about 1 million hryvnias annually. Let us recall that the BYuT majority of the oblast council "rewarded" the positions of deputy head to the main Rukh activist of the region, Volodymyr Banada, and the head of the Volyn UNP, former people's deputy Borys Zahreva. Both actively supported Anatoliy Hrytsiuk in his election to the position of head. Additional funds for the maintenance of the head and deputies are planned to be found by cutting the positions of advisers. It seems that the current leadership of the Volyn Oblast Council considers itself significantly wiser than the previous one, and therefore needs fewer advisers.

Divided? ...And we will redistribute! "We believe that about 50 objects of oblast communal property, which today are outside our management, were privatized in a not entirely legal way," the head of the Volyn Oblast Council, Anatoliy Hrytsiuk, stated recently. Note — not "the court decided" or "law enforcement agencies established," but "we believe." It is interesting who specifically stands behind this impersonal "we." Probably, Anatoliy Petrovych has in mind the business circles of the BYuT deputy corps, who may ask themselves a reasonable question: were these "50 objects" privatized by supporters of the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc? Such statements, without legislative specifics, without indicating the objects themselves and the motivation for the illegality of their privatization, are nothing other than a destabilizing factor for the investment environment of the region. Which entrepreneur will invest funds in developing their business, creating new jobs, when tomorrow "they" decide that a certain object was privatized "not entirely legally" and begin a new, "entirely legal" privatization? The answer to this rhetorical question is equally rhetorical — no one.

More deputies! More officials! Roads — will wait..? The leadership of the Lutsk City Council, headed by the city mayor — a member of "Batkivshchyna," Bohdan Shyba — is not lagging behind its oblast colleagues. Unlike his predecessor, the Lutsk mayor will have not four but five deputies; in addition, the positions of deputy and secretary of the council have been "separated," which added another highly paid status. A draft decision on a threefold increase in the staff of the city council is also being submitted to the next session of the city council. The work previously performed for the same forty-five deputies by three people is now proposed to be transferred to ten. New subdivisions should also appear in the staff of the executive committee. Deputies-representatives of the "Reforms and Order" party, who actively oppose the growth in the number of city officials, consider such decisions unjustified. "This is an extensive, wrong path," says the head of the Volyn Oblast Organization of the PRP, Oleksandr Martyniuk, "perhaps we should review approaches to work, make it more efficient with the number of employees that exists, and then raise the question of expansion." According to deputy and head of the Lutsk City Organization of the PRP, Dmytro Moskvych: the previous deputy corps did not have particular problems with preparing documents or organizing work, and new jobs should be created at the city's enterprises, not for bureaucrats.