Breakfast Briefing with the municipal councilors of the Municipality of Drenas

05.07.2019

Democracy for Development institute (D4D) has continued with the breakfast briefing series, by meeting on monday, 1st of July, with the municipal councilors of the Municipality of Drenas to discuss more about the word of the municipal assembly, cooperation between municipal councilors of all political subjects, the relationship between the executive and legislative bodies, as well as about issues that the councilors encounter while executing their duties and responsibilities.

Lack of proper monitoring of Municipal Assembly sessions was among the main concerns of the guests, who stated that the current system installed by the Municipality was done to check a box and fulfill the criteria of live streaming of the session on the internet, because the video is not clear at all, the angle of the camera is not properly placed, and the sound is so terrible that you cannot understand who is speaking and what is being discussed in the session.

The opposition representatives also stated that during last year they jointly contributed to pay a local television to record and transmit some of the sessions held at the Assembly in order to make it possible for the citizens of Drenas have access to the discussion held in the Municipal Assembly. This initiative has stopped because of to main issues: a) because of financial issues of opposition representatives, since the payment was made with personal assets; and b) because the Municipality of Drenas did not allocate funds from its budget to pay for the cover of the sessions by the local public television.

Aside from many obstacles, representatives of the opposition have a very good relationship among themselves and often cooperated to push forward policies for the wellbeing of the citizens, and sometimes also to protest policies that would be harming for the citizens of the Municipality of Drenas.

In conclusion, the main request from this meeting was to fix the monitoring system for the sessions that are held at the Municipal Assembly of Drenas, the video output to be clear and for the whole Assembly be shown in it, and also fix the sound of the video and show the identity of the person that speaks.

These meetings are organized within the framework of the “Increased participation for good governance” project, implemented by the Democracy for Development institute (D4D) with support of the Embassy of the Netherlands in Kosovo.