Estonia, Law and Regulations, Legislation
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Friday, 29.03.2024, 01:53
Estonian government approves of local municipality reform schedule
The first steps are to develop the local government reform principles and criteria and to prepare a draft law on administrative reform. The administrative reform law has to be approved no later than 1 July 2016.
Then the local municipalities are assessed with the criteria set out in the law. The municipalities that do not meet the criteria, have to merge some other municipality.
The period of preparations to voluntary mergers lasts till 15 October 2017, when municipal elections are held, that will enforce the mergers.
In November 2017, the preparations to mergers initiated by the government start. Extraordinary elections take place in these municipalities starting 1 August 2018 and in the merged municipalities, new authorities will start operating on October 1, 2018.
The government also approved doubling the merger subsidies. To facilitate own-initiative mergers, a subsidy that is two times bigger than paid currently is allocated to municipalities that decide to merge by 2017.
Currently there are around 200 local municipalities in Estonia, in most of which, less than 2,000 people live, which makes operating such small structural units ineffective and thus, the government has for years tried to get smaller and weaker municipalities to merge but with little success.