On 19 July, the deputies of the Kolomyia City Council voted for approval to join the four village councils in the villages of Sheparivtsi, Ivanivtsi, Tovmachyk and Sadzhavka to Kolomyia. 24 votes “for” made the formation of the Kolomyiska AH close to a logical conclusion.

“The Kolomyiska hromada will be quite large, one of the largest in the Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast. The population of Kolomyiska AH will be more than 68.000 residents. Kolomyia understands the opportunities for development, not only financial but also territorial ones,” said Maksym Chopei, decentralisation adviser of the Ivano-Frankivsk Local Government Development Centre, who attended the session.

“The most important in this process is to find common interests and to balance them for all amalgamation participants. Decentralisation is aimed, first of all, to raise the living standard, create new points of economic growth. I am sure that the financial resource will be more evenly distributed in rural areas of the Kolomyiska AH. This will give the opportunity to provide medical, educational and other services at the highest level in the rural areas that access the city,” says Ruslan Panasyuk, director of Ivano-Frankivsk Local Government Development Centre.

According to the calculations made by experts of the Ivano-Frankivsk Local Government Development Centre, established with the support of the U-LEAD with Europe Programme, the future Kolomyiska AH will have a fairly large financial resource. Only the own revenues of the hromada under amalgamation will make up UAH 485 million, while the general budget of the future hromada will be UAH 621 million.

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