Today, Minister of Public Administration and Local Self-Government Marija Obradović is in an official visit to the city of Niš, where she has visited the City Hall together with the city’s Mayor, Ms. Dragana Sotirovski.
After visiting the City Hall, which is home to the future one-stop shop, which will be fully redesigned, equipped with the full software suite and redesigned, Minister Obradović said the city of Niš and its City Hall were among the best-performing in Serbia, both in terms of their commitment and the scope of services they provided to citizens and in terms of applications for various projects financed from the Ministry’s budget funds.
She pointed out 5 million dinars had been earmarked for the opening of the one-stop shop in Niš, with mandatory co-financing of 500 thousand dinars by the city. However, she noted this amount was insufficient because, unfortunately, the Ministry’s entire fund earmarked for the opening of one-stop shops in this year was only 40 million dinars, which she said was a modest amount, noting that next year’s figure would have to be higher, because the available resources were insufficient to keep up with modernisation efforts and Serbia’s desired pace of progress.
“The concept of a one-stop shop in Serbia is based on the idea of saving time and money and making citizens satisfied with their city and municipal administrations. In addition to the money we have allocated, our Ministry has been cooperating with local self-government units to continually educate civil servants, because the point of public administration reform is exactly to enable citizens to finish their business with the public administration at a single service desk, served by a helpful civil servant, and to create customer satisfaction. This is not the case everywhere in Serbia at the moment and that is something we need to address. The city and municipal administration is the first point of contact between the state and its citizens and it is therefore the duty of both our Ministry and local-level managers to change the treatment of citizens by local administration staff”, Ms. Obradović said.
She commended the work of the mayor of Niš, praising her for infusing new energy and demonstrating commitment to her work and for showing that not everything was necessarily just a matter of available resources and proving that the people who manage local self-governments can make a difference.
After visiting the City Hall of Niš, Minister Obradović also visited the Roma settlement of Beograd Mahala, accompanied by State Secretary Mr. Stevan Gligorin and the Mayor of Niš Ms. Dragana Sotirovski.
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