site.btaBTA Offers Municipal Councils Help with Publicity

All municipal councils can publish the agenda and decisions of their meetings on the BTA website to solve the issue of transparency, BTA Director General Kiril Valchev said here Friday. He was speaking at a meeting with the National Association of Chairpersons of Municipal Councils in the Republic of Bulgaria and the chair of the parliamentary Regional Development Committee, Kosta Stoyanov.

The meeting discussed changes in the Local Self-Government and Local Power Act and revising provisions in it concerning publicity in the work of the local authorities.

The BTA Director General said that if it starts to publish the agenda and decisions of the municipal councils' meetings, BTA will become something of a hub of all public information. 

"The BTA website is ready to start publishing information, agendas and decisions of absolutely all municipal councils, as soon as clear rules are adopted," Valchev stressed, adding that such a partnership could be "dressed up in legal form". If such a law is adopted, BTA will be able to build technical infrastructure for live broadcasts of municipal councils' sessions, he said. In this way, municipalities and municipal councils would be fulfilling their legal obligations with funding from the State and not from their own budgets, Valchev added.

Participants backed the idea and suggested that a working group with municipal experts be set up with the parliamentary regional development committee to discuss all the possibilities for revising the law.