Mayor of Nil?fer, Mr. Mustafa Bozbey, will renovate the program of experience exchange between employees of twin cities municipalities and invite employees of Mykolaiv City Council

Mayor of Turkish city Nilüfer, Mr. Mustafa Bozbey, has offered Mykolaiv to continue and intensify the cooperation.

The first step for the further cooperation, Mayor of Nilüfer, Mr. Mustafa Bozbey did, was that he urgently held a meeting of the deputies of Nilüfer City Council with Mykolaiv delegation and instructed deputies and employees of Mykolaiv City Council concerning the niceties of local self-government.

The joint meeting was held in the form of a session meeting on Thursday, March 29.

Deputies of Mykolaiv City Council had the opportunity to chat personally with each council member of Nilüfer and the heads of the departments and offices of Nilüfer district municipality.

During the session, Turkey showed the presentation, which was created specifically for the visit of the deputies and employees of Mykolaiv City Council. Later, Mustafa Bozbey’s press service will send a full version of the video presentation, where the video-story authors demonstrated important events on the initiative and participation of Mustafa Bozbey - work with other twin cities and their joint projects; memorable places opening; meeting with the municipality partners, awarding of Nilüfer municipality for the held quality assurance control of the City Council; members’ of district committees elections.

It should be noted that the Municipality of Nilüfer was founded in 1989, in the presentation there were also shown first three heads of the city hall, besides Mustafa Bozbey. We remind that Mustafa Bozbey has been the mayor of Nilüfer for 19 years in a row. Nilüfer is one of the central districts of the province of Bursa. As of 2017, the population of Nilüfer is 424 thousand inhabitants.

NilüferMunicipality is the first council of self-government, which began to develop the district development strategy (since 2002). Before working out a development strategy, the municipality conducted a budget analysis and research of the strengths and weaknesses of the City Hall and the possibility of emerging hazards.

For strategic plans fulfillment, Nilüfer identified six values: equality, freedom, social assistance management, and the participation of all people in this process, conscience and democracy. For more efficient development of Nilüfer district, the City Council works on the model of "people’s participation" in most processes of local self-government - receiving questionnaires with various offers of citizens (website, social networks, personal letters from residents of the district, media), after analysis is made. Assistants in this process are district committees that are created from the citizens of Nilüfer district. Committees present their proposals and raise issues. District committees also participate in the management of Nilüfer. Ordinary citizens can make suggestions concerning making amendments to the decisions taken by the council.

We emphasize that in Nilüfer there is statistics of obligatory satisfaction of citizens' questionnaires.

Nilüfer has nine committees that work in different directions. Together with the levels of planning, the committees analyze and evaluate the decisions taken by the board, and then observe the strategic plan, developed by certain offices and departments of the city hall. After innovative projects are developed.

One can conclude that the City Hall works on the principles: first, people and provision of quality services to citizens, to be the city of education, science, culture, art and sports.

Deputy of Mykolaiv City Council Yevhen Rymar, asking the finance department of Nilüfer Municipality about the amount of money spent on filling the budget of Turkey, noted that in Mykolaiv, through decentralization, 40% of the city budget is directed to the state budget of Ukraine, while the rest 60% remain and work for city.

The head of the department said that Nilüfer funds are working to fill the budget of Bursa - the environmental cleanup tax is paid, while the rest of the budget remains in Nilüfer.

"We receive 25% of the budget from the state of Turkey, 75% - from taxes. The budget of Nilüfer (from the state) for 2018 is 90 million dollars. We send 4% of the budget we receive to the state sports and other institutions," - added Mustafa Bozbey.

According to the media reports, Turkey intends to support the real economy by allocating 37 billion Turkish liras ($ 9.7 billion) from the state budget in 2018. The amount of the budget allocated by the state to the cities is determined by the data of population statistics.

Continuing the conversation about budget revenues, the deputy of Mykolaiv City Council Anatolii Petrov asked exactly what economic directions and strategies were developed and implemented in Nilüfer.

"Our primary goals were - the development of sports, science, culture. Thus, we have increased the demand for investments attraction in Nilüfer. In connection with the growth of population, we have consolidated and increased our economic capacity and strengthened the district budget," - said Mustafa Bozbey.

The deputy of Mykolaiv City Council Oleksii Lepishev, referring to Nilüfer's transport strategy, asked the mayor to tell if there is a municipal transport and how the passenger traffic in Nilüfer works.

Mustafa Bozbey replied that all questions regarding transport work are solved in Bursa. Most buses are public, but Bursa has also municipal shuttle buses.

It should be noted that in Turkey there are also discounted fares for students and people of retirement age. At the same time, the full price of a ticket in public transport is 2 TL 50 kur., and with a discount - 1 TL 65 kur., the difference is paid by the Municipality of Bursa. In addition, there are discounts for children, and for warriors public transport is free.

It turned out that there is an electronic card for buses and trams in Bursa and Nilüfer, there are special machines on subway stations and inside the city to pay for travel.

During a small excursion in the city hall, deputy of Mykolaiv City Council Kyrylo Gorburov noticed a room similar to the Department of administrative services rendering to the citizens and asked the mayor of Nilüfer, what exactly the information center performs.

As Mustafa Bozbey said, citizens can contact the informational center staff for any information, write a request and get advice. The staff of the informational center delivers information about the citizens’ problems to the relevant departments of Nilüfer municipality. For example, it’s possible to address the informational center to register a public organization or receive an answer regarding land issues.

"According to Turkish law, we must respond to a citizen's request within 30 days. Since 2002, we have implemented a system for the quality improvement of IC work, so we have the opportunity to respond within 6 days. For questions of a consultative nature, we respond within 6 hours - either send a response to a person's e-mail or phone. As of 2017, we have received more than 30 thousand requests from citizens," – said Mustafa Bozbey.

Kyrylo Gorburov, noticing the differences in work between the Department of administrative services rendering in Mykolaiv and informational center in Nilüfer, clarified that the Department of Mykolaiv City Council is involved in the registration of property rights, the provision of foreign passports, etc. Therefore, he asked which department deals with similar issues in Turkey, and got the reply that informational center does not have such tasks and powers. In general, work with documents is performed by another public authority, for example, the population department registers the place of residence.

If we compare the number of employees of Municipalities of Nilüfer and Mykolaiv, it turns out that approximately 10 times more is the number of employees of the municipality of Nilüfer, since only 1080 employees are engaged in the cleaning of parks of Nilüfer district.

Mykolaiv delegation was very surprised by the fact that there are no small architectural forms on the territory of Nilüfer. When MCC deputies asked about the availability of kiosks or something like this, the council members did not understand what they were talking about and answered that "there is none in Nilüfer".

Taking into account the difficult situation in Mykolaiv with the location of outdoor advertisement at public transport stops and throughout the city, the MCC officials asked: how do Nilüfer authorities keep in control the situation and do not use a large number of boards to advertise business or trade and other services. Mustafa Bozbey said that all advertisement of economic activity is carried out with the help of social media:

"We are categorically against the use of boards in Nilüfer. Special places for advertisement are at the stops and in the transport. We carefully monitor this. All questions regarding the advertisement pass through the decision of the city hall".

Also, the city hall provided interesting information on programs of condominiums and citizens’ of private sectors communities - it turned out that unlike in Mykolaiv, there is no such practice in Nilüfer, because of the lack of private residential premises.

At the end of the session, the deputy of Mykolaiv City Council Vladyslav Yentin thanked Mustafa Bozbey for arranging a business trip for Mykolaiv delegation and made a business proposal:

"It has historically happened, that all deputy convocations think more about the inhabitants’ quality of life, than the inhabitants care about their city. People sometimes forget that any changes must be begun with themselves. The mentality of the Ukrainian and Turkish people is very different. The only opportunity to change something in Mykolaiv is to see, find out and learn important things on the example of other perspective cities such as Nilüfer. Only in this way you can learn the secrets of the strategic plan for the introduction of new technologies and reforms aimed at the development of the city and the country. We want to change the bureaucratic approach. Therefore, we propose to restart the program of experience exchange among the officials of the municipalities of twin cities and, if you allow, to send the employees of Mykolaiv City Council to the City Council of Nilüfer. Our employees must see with their own eyes how you can maintain cleanliness in parks, order on the streets of Nilüfer and fight corruption".

Mustafa Bozbey supported the initiative of Mykolaiv delegation and said that there was such a practice with other sister cities, so it is quite possible to implement it with Mykolaiv:

"Perhaps there is no such city in the world that has implemented that. We would like to make this with Mykolaiv. According to the minutes, which we will sign, our employee of the mayor's office will be able to work in Mykolaiv City Council. During this time, they will learn from their own experience how the city municipality works. Thus, employees of Mykolaiv City Council can work in the city hall of Nilüfer".

It should be noted that Mustafa Bozbey has been accompanying Mykolaiv delegation for three days: first, the mayor of Nilüfer invited MCC representatives to his office located in the city council, and discussed further possible joint projects with Bursa; the second meeting took place in the session hall of the mayor's office of Nilüfer; the last meeting was held during lunch, which was also attended by assistants of Mustafa Bozbey, representatives of the General Consulate of Ukraine in Istanbul and several deputies of the City Hall of Nilüfer.