Press Release, 5.11.2019

The opposition in the Moscow City Duma has made the Moscow authorities to conduct public hearings on the draft budget for Moscow for 2020. The hearing will be held in the Public Chamber of Moscow today, on 5 November. The lack of a public hearing was one of the reasons why the Yabloko faction voted against the draft budget in the first reading.

The day after the first reading on the budget, on October 31, the Public Chamber of Moscow announced on its website of holding a public hearing on 5 November. At the same time, the organisers allocated only one day for registration of the participants in the hearings – 4 November, which is a public holiday and a day off and many Moscow residents could be away from the city.

According to Maxim Kruglov, head of the Yabloko faction in the Moscow City Duma, there is no such thing as public hearings on the draft budget in the Moscow legislation, although the federal law obliges to hold hearings as a mandatory stage of the legislative process, without which the adoption of the document is impossible.

The wording of Article 26.13 of the federal law “On the general principles of organization of legislative (representative) and executive bodies of state power of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation” are such that the region has no choice whether to hold public hearings or not, they are mandatory, Kruglov emphasises.

The need for a public hearing can be envisaged by the charter of the subject of the Russian Federation, as is done, for example, in St. Petersburg or the Moscow region. Further, the procedure for holding hearings should be stipulated by a regional law on the budget process. The Moscow law does not have such a rule, and therefore the procedure for recording the results of hearings is not defined.

Maxim Kruglov notes that the procedure can only be determined in accordance with the powers of the participants in the budget process, and the Public Chamber of Moscow is not such a participant.

“Nevertheless, it is good that the Moscow Mayor’s Office listened to our criticism, and the citizens will have an opportunity to speak about the draft budget even in such as strange form, and the budget is by 50 per cent by their taxes. At the same time, we consider these measures to be insufficient, and we will seek to introduce into the law on the budget process a rule on holding full scale public hearings,” Kruglov says.

It should be noted that during the discussion of the budget of Moscow for 2020 and the period of  2021-2022 the Yabloko faction called on Moscow City Duma deputies to send the draft for finalisation to the Moscow government. Deputies from Yabloko identified four reasons why this should be done: first, the budget of Moscow is technically impossible to compare with the budgets of other regions, second, the document was not discussed with citizens and experts, third, a number of important target programmes were reduced and bureaucracy expenses are inflated; and fourth, local government expenses account for only 0.5 per cent.