Translated material
The blessing of the state
Sverdlovsk authorities rewarded themselves with an additional increase in salaries
The authorities of the Sverdlovsk region showed the public an excellent example of taking care of themselves. They decided to increase their salaries ahead of schedule and unscheduled. And even more significantly than for ordinary public sector employees - due to the overfulfillment of the plan for additional revenues of the regional budget.Even before the end of the half-year, the regional governor Eduard Rossel announced that the tax collection plan had been exceeded by almost 8 billion rubles. Thus, last year’s record, when by this time the treasury received an additional 6 billion rubles, has already been broken. The draft amendments to the 2006 regional budget propose distributing additional funding, increasing the volume of road construction, doubling child benefits, paying increased compensation to families of caregivers, and increasing spending on the Yekaterinburg metro. At the proposal of the regional authorities, in connection with the significant increase in income, the rates of state employees will also be revised - from October 1, the treasury will allocate 15% more funds to this item than now.
In addition to teachers and doctors, the increase will also affect employees of regional executive authorities. But their salaries will increase not from October 1, but from the second half of the year, and for good work the increase will be more than 20%.
According to the bill submitted to the regional Duma, immediately after the adoption of amendments to the budget, the governor’s salary should increase from 127 to 150 thousand rubles. per month. A similar increase will apply to deputies of both chambers of the region’s legislative assembly and members of the government. Thus, the salary fund of two speakers (they have one line in the budget) should increase by 490 thousand rubles, and the prime minister and his deputies - by 526 thousand.
There is no explanation in the bill for why the regional leadership decided to increase their salaries before all state employees became richer. At its official presentation in parliament, the speaker, Deputy Minister of Finance of the region Svetlana Klimuk, tactfully avoided the topic of increasing salaries of officials. The deputies, even the opposition minority, did not ask questions - after all, their salaries would be increased in the same way as the governor. In addition, the amendments imply the allocation of an additional 50 million rubles to parliament. for the construction of a new legislative building.
At the same time, there is no need to talk about increasing the salaries of officials due to inflation - the last time the salaries of regional management were revised was on January 1, 2006. Then the cost of the governor’s salary was increased in the budget from 1.2 million rubles. per year to 1.58 million. Similar dynamics for other recipients of budget funds.
If we consider the costs of maintaining the state authorities of the region since the beginning of the century, the growth in wages will be amazing. In 2000, when the average salary in the region was 3 thousand rubles, Eduard Rossel’s salary was 20,400 rubles; in the first months of 2006, the average Sverdlovsk resident earned 9.5 thousand, and his governor earned 127 thousand.
The regional elite does not intend to abandon this practice. Presenting the budget message for 2007 last Friday, Eduard Rossel announced to government members and deputies: “Next year we must remain a donor region. If this doesn’t work out, there are rules according to which we will lose part of our powers and will not be able to determine the amount of wages for public sector employees ourselves.”
One of the deputies of the regional Duma, on condition of anonymity, told a Vremya Novostey correspondent that this is how the Sverdlovsk leader reacted to the conflict between the authorities of the Saratov region and the regional prosecutor’s office. Let us recall that the supervisory authority challenges the personnel policy of the regional governor, who pays his subordinates salaries several times more than employees of regional departments of federal authorities receive. The prosecutor's office considers these payments illegal, since the region is annually forced to apply for subsidies from the federal treasury to equalize its budget. The day before Eduard Rossel’s speech, his Saratov colleague Pavel Ipatov lost his trial in the Supreme Court. “Rossel does not want to end up in the same story as Ipatov, and we will remain donors in order to increase our salaries again from January 1,” says the parliamentarian.