The budget deficit will affect the reduction of City Hall officials

The Mykolaiv city council will reduce the number of employees due to the reduction of the city's budget by almost two times.

Mykolaiv City Mayor Oleksandr Sienkevych announced this during a press conference on January 4, NikVesti reports.

As you know, due to the removal of the personal income tax paid by military personnel, the budget of Mykolaiv in 2024 lost 3.4 billion hryvnias of revenue. In this regard, in order to save money, Oleksandr Sienkevych plans to reduce the number of employees of the city council and utility companies. It is also planned to merge some divisions to optimize work.

«One of the largest items of expenditure is the payment of labor with accruals, this applies to officials, the social sphere. Taking into account the fact that we are planning to reduce budget expenditures, we also plan to return to the issue of reducing the number of employees of various departments in the City Council. Therefore, this is more, probably, information not for you, but for employees, so that they understand that they should work more efficiently or they will go find another job,»  said the mayor.

Due to budget cuts, the city will also reduce spending on space heating where there are currently no large numbers of people and road maintenance and will reduce street lighting hours.

«In addition to reducing the number of officials, expenses for maintaining the road network, mechanized street cleaning, and maintaining the temperature in social facilities will be reduced. We have a lot of money going into street lighting maintenance. Today, of the 160 million necessary for this, we have allocated 80 million for half a year. Perhaps we will reduce the number of hours for street lighting. Due to the fact that the number of expenses has decreased, the amount of work will decrease, so we will combine several managers into one. This will reduce service personnel, accounting and so on. That is, people will be released,» said Oleksandr Sienkevych.

As you know, within the framework of the law «On the State Budget for 2024», the Cabinet of Ministers plans to direct all revenues from the personal income tax of military personnel, 64% of which currently remain in local budgets, to the state budget. The Association of Cities of Ukraine believes that these funds will most likely be dissolved in the state budget, as well as 36% of the current personal income tax, which is administered by the Ministry of Finance. We are talking about 25.8 billion hryvnias this year and 93.7 billion hryvnias next year, Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal specified the day before.

The Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine can allocate over 517 million hryvnias to the communities of the Mykolaiv region to compensate for the loss of personal income tax from military income.

On October 6, 2023, it was reported that the Budget Committee of the Verkhovna Rada reviewed the decision on the draft law on personal income tax from the military and made amendments : from October 1 to December 31, 2023, the «military» personal income tax is transferred to the state budget in the proportion of 50% to 50%. One part of 13 billion hryvnias will go to the State Service for Special Communications and Information Protection of Ukraine for drones, and the second part, also 13 billion hryvnias, will be directed to the Ministry of Defense for the purchase of artillery systems.

Earlier, the mayor of the city Oleksandr Sienkevych said that the military personal income tax withdrawn from the budget of Mykolaiv will be directed to the production of weapons, in particular, drones for the Armed Forces of Ukraine.