It looks like local administration reforms will finally be approved next week. The problem is that the changes should have happened long ago, and any new bill needs to go through parliament for several months. The additional delays mean that the reforms won't go into effect until 2014.
The language of the reforms lower salaries for town councilmen and mayors and call for an audit of public accounts within a year's time, which would further slow down the reforms. What happened? The reforms met a lot of resistance, because they affect specific and well-informed groups. Still, the national government should not have waited so long to carry out this critical component of containing the the annual deficits that local governments run.
