English

Minsk City Soviet passes budget cuts

The Minsk City Soviet, at a September 23 session, approved a spending cut of 482 billion rubels ($175 million) to the city’s 2009 budget, BelaPAN said.

According to Alyaksandr Kernazhitski, head of the Minsk City Executive Committee’s Financial Department, the cuts include 84 billion rubels from the social sphere, nearly 80 billion rubels from the housing maintenance sector, 25.5 billion rubels from transport and 202 billion rubels from agriculture programs.

The city authorities also will save 65.3 billion rubels originally slated for wage hikes.

The funding cuts are to affect modernization and renovation projects and the Minsktrans public transport operator.

The Minsk authorities reviewed this year’s expenditures after realizing that the budget revenues would fall short of the target by 471.8 billion rubels.

The Minsk budget is projected to receive 4.9 trillion rubels in revenues, while expenditures are to total 5.6 trillion rubels.

Mikhail Matusevich, chairman of the soviet, said at the session that the city authorities had approved 300 billion rubels in budget cuts before. “We have started cutting budget spending only this year, soviet members used to distribute extra revenues previously,” he said.