What is a community? According to our legislation, “the community is the base for democracy within the state. The community is a regional administrative and population unit and the people elect bodies to govern or implement local government.” The latter, according to the European Legislation on Local Government passed in 1985, claims that communities “regulate and govern a large part of state issues by taking responsibility and taking the people’s interests into consideration.” Just by these two definitions it is clear to see that the Armenian system is weak. There can’t be democracy in the Armenian communities as long as there are community heads who are not elected by the people. Today, there are many community heads in Armenia who simply don’t have the physical/mental abilities to work for the people. Let’s suppose that Armenian communities take on the responsibility of taking care of the state issues, wishing to maintain the principles set forward by the European Legislation on Local Government. But what tools does the community have? Are those tools the budget or other forms of money provided by the state? In Armenia, communities levy taxes and form a budget. As for the income taxes, taxes from profits and the percentage rates for deductions in the community budget’s amounts for natural resources, they are set each year according to the law about state budgets. Of course, besides the flow of taxes, financial sources for the community budget include state and local fees, non taxable incomes, renting lands belonging to the community and fees paid for use and profits received from real estate with no owner, money in the form of money transfers provided with the principle of setting things straight, etc. However, this is not enough to take care of all the community’s expenses. In addition to this, we must mention the fact that moral ethics in Armenia’s local government are on a very low level. This not only refers to the community heads and members of the alderman council, but also to the way that the staff works. Many officials working for the local governments today strive to use all possible sources in order to keep the money flowing into the budget. Thanks to them, we don’t develop financially. Besides that, the community has the right to fill up the budget deficit by hiding stocks, however, Armenia is not experienced in hiding municipal stocks and that is due to the fact that people just don’t trust the communities. We can see that the sources for forming the community’s budget are many in number, however, the 930 communities in Armenia currently face financial problems due to lack of mechanisms.
The Union of Armenian Communities NGO has been around since 1997. All the heads of communities, members of the alderman council, community service workers, representatives of the elite and specialists are members of the NGO. The NGO’s main goal is to develop the local government system and it cooperates with a number of international organizations. Armenia has signed the European local government pact and must maintain the principles set forward by Europe.
Today, there are many other main issues and uncertainties facing the local government system, particularly relations between state/local governing bodies, control and audit of communities, transparency of their actions, etc. We will present the opinions of specialists in this field in one of our next editions.