Prime Minister Edi Rama held a meeting today in Durrës with the country’s mayors, where they discussed the key challenges municipalities will face during the year, preparations for the tourist season, and the need for a joint political and social battle against plastic waste.

 

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Today we are here as part of the meetings organised to open the year, to discuss the challenges and, of course, to set together some milestones along the road and to define the main issues we will need to address jointly, because, as for matters related to the day-to-day administration in each municipality, you know those yourselves.

Now, as we stand before this situation of plastic aggression, of plastic waste, which is a direct impact of human behaviour, we must become aware and we must commit to launching a joint offensive at both the central and local levels, and to engaging our communities as much as possible: on the one hand, to raise awareness of this factor and, on the other hand, to create the conditions to bring under control this extremely dangerous and harmful factor, not only for these emergencies but for many other things as well, because what happens with plastic ends up flowing into the sea, causing irreversible damage to marine life; it causes irreversible damage to the quality of our food, and so on.

This is why I have asked the Minister of Local Government to establish a joint task force between the central government and local authorities, made up of several key government representatives and several representatives from among you, to design a shared three phase plan short term, medium term, and long term, a comprehensive 360 degree plan, ranging from awareness raising to action across multiple dimensions.

Another element that certainly influences these emergencies is the level of resilience of the protective infrastructure. By protective infrastructure, I mean drainage channels, embankments, and pumping stations. Its resilience has increased very significantly over the last 10 years, but the analysis made following this emergency shows that there are points where resilience is weaker and, for this reason, we must set very precisely the milestones to further strengthen the protective infrastructure and, on the other hand, to address all aspects related to strengthening interaction between local government and local institutions.

One of the things proposed by Minister Demo, and which has received support, is that with a fund secured from our valued friends of the United Arab Emirates, worth 20 million euros in support of rural development, we purchase a significant number of vehicles to be placed at the service of drainage, for cleaning all the main drainage channels, and to operate according to the needs of municipalities. We have a positive experience created with the pilot project of the Albanian Development Fund in the Dibër region, where a joint company was established, and a dedicated fleet was put into operation for cleaning drainage channels, maintaining rural road infrastructure, and paving gravel roads. It worked very well, so now it is time to increase capacity and create logistics that will be available to municipalities by region. In this way, this fleet can concentrate more forces where an emergency arises, and municipalities will feel far better prepared to handle emergencies, or, on normal working days, it will be an additional force for all municipalities, depending on the length of channels to be cleaned and maintained, and depending on the need to address the issue of embankments. So, it is the minister who will take this project forward, working closely with the Albanian Development Fund and, of course, ensuring a rational distribution of these vehicles so that in normal times they are stationed across all regions according to needs, and in emergencies they can be reallocated to wherever the most difficult front is.

The third point I want to share with you is the need for a meaningful step this year towards an entrepreneurial municipality. We have spoken and re-spoken about this, and we are still very far from creating a local force that can take part in the economic life of the territory, become an influential force for economic development, and, at the same time, in the name of the public interest and public function, generate revenues. Keep in mind that we remain the last country in any kind of ranking, not only in Europe but, I believe, also at very low levels globally, where local government only uses taxes to function: it uses the taxes of Albanians collected by the central government, and then a part of them is distributed to local government. It uses local taxes and fees, but if any of you is asked how much revenue the municipality has generated for itself through economic activity, the figures are ridiculous and are mainly, almost entirely, linked to rents.

Meanwhile, the space is very large to bring the municipality in as an active player in economic development and as a beneficiary of that development. We are doing this at the central level; even there, we are far behind, but conditions have been created, because it would have been extremely difficult before, and the conditions have been created for us to begin building an entrepreneurial state: to be entrepreneurial by becoming a partner with the private sector and by participating in the profit of enterprise. We are doing this with the defence industry; we are doing this with the Albanian Investment Corporation (AIC); we are trying to do this in every sector by making our assets available to entrepreneurial initiatives or by investing funds directly.

In this way, we will move forward, and we will continue to condition ourselves in spending funds based on what we bring back as profit. The Minister of Economy, who is here, has also prepared a matrix for all ministries to measure how much revenue outside the state budget these ministries generate. This is a new phase; it is not something we need to invent. Other countries have done these things long ago, and we only need to learn from best practices and move forward.

The only motive for granting land with a symbolic contract, the “1 euro” contract, the only motive is hotel development. So, if someone has property where part is state-owned and part private, or if in a certain development there is a tourist resort and there is a state-owned part there, it will no longer happen that the state-owned part is granted for villas, for pools, and for these sorts of things; it will only be granted for hotel facilities, nothing else. Anything else is: take the part you want and pay, unit by unit, what you also pay to the private owner.

In this regard, municipalities can take an important role. In cooperation with AIC, they can develop projects and carry out extraordinary developments with benefits. Benefits that range from building public assets, meaning offices, schools, kindergartens, nurseries, and others, to generating direct revenues, without forgetting the social benefit for those families in need of housing.

Therefore, we are carrying out a reform, and we will soon have an agency where planning, development, and housing will be together, and this agency will be at the disposal of the local government, together with AIC and, naturally, under the leadership of the Ministry of Economy. This process will be open to everyone, but it requires a creative, proactive, determined approach from you. It requires initiative. Every part of the territory must be viewed with an entrepreneurial approach.

And here I come to another part. We held an exclusive meeting on the Mountains Package. As we speak today, not all municipalities have completed the first phase. Minister Demo, who leads the Mountains Package, will speak about this in detail, but it is unacceptable.

What should our objective be? I do not know whether you have seen it or whether we have shared it, but the moment the Mountains Package was published on its website, on the first day, there were over 700 expressions of interest from Albanians living abroad. It is a safe instrument to attract the savings of Albanians abroad and also to attract Albanians abroad to return home and start a solid, indisputably safe business, which would bring them much higher income than any ordinary job they may be doing in England or Greece, and so on.

And I have asked Minister Demo to set a target for each municipality. Our ambition should be 1,000 investments from this package, 1,000. If you spread them across the territory, over 60 municipalities, according to potential, it is not too many: 1,000 investments. And I have asked the minister to define how many investments must have entered the process by the time each of you will claim to run again.

I say within three years because in the final year of the mandate, the doors of the 1,000 investments must be opening. So focus and take this very seriously. Especially the municipalities with less access must understand that this is a key to attract people to places where it may seem there is no reason for people to come, because the great fortune of this country is that it does not have a part of its body that is not beautiful. It does not. Yes, some parts are ugly where humans have put their hands in, no doubt, but I am talking about nature.

Another essential element is to take a further step to increase the quality of planning and design and, for this, the new agency that will be created will have as its objective and mission to be an additional force and to assist municipalities in planning and to create a faster channel of interaction, whether to plan development zones, to plan projects for development permits and building permits, or to plan the part related to all buildings with a social character: schools, kindergartens, nurseries, health centres, and other institutions, which most likely this agency can design by leveraging the extraordinary capacity of foreign architects and local studios working with them, and which we have brought to the country, also thanks to the foundation created with all these architects, so that the initial designs are all pro bono: if you want to build a school, you get the initial design pro bono; if you want to build a health centre, you get the initial design pro bono, and so on. This will happen soon because, practically, the reform plan to create this new agency is almost complete.

Another component for which I want us to have a new approach and a strong commitment from municipalities is vocational education. We need to increase the capacities of vocational education, but to do that, as we have discussed repeatedly within government, we must first create excellent conditions, not merely good ones. Excellent conditions. We must have vocational schools with meaningful laboratories, not classrooms like those we found in the past, where young electricians learned their trade from a teacher drawing a light bulb on the blackboard. They must be laboratories of the highest quality. And the dormitories of vocational schools must be dignified hotels, with very good conditions for all students who come, including those from remote areas, rural areas, and low-income families, so that from the very first moment, the importance of vocational education and society’s respect for it is understood and felt. We have taken steps forward, but I invite all of you to think and, as soon as possible, bring us proposals for nuclei of vocational training and education across the territory, ranging from professions connected to the nature of the local economy you manage, to training in technology. We must give all children across Albania, regardless of geographic location, access to vocational training in technology. We have built laboratories, we will have all schools with laboratories, but those who go one step further: we must have everywhere a class, everywhere a vocational school and a vocational school class, and even if the vocational school is only a tourism school, one class should be for technology.

Another aspect we will discuss is certainly the aspect of legalisation, to understand where we are and how the new formula of involving local government has progressed, and what the objectives are for the year to bring this process to an end. And finally, not in importance, but I listed the others first, which will be part of our discussion later, is the topic for which the Minister of Tourism is here: the season, the tourist season. Although it has the greatest intensity on beaches, which we have spoken and will speak about today as well, because there are some new things the public needs to know in the yearly progress we have made to create more dignified conditions on beaches, the season affects every municipality. This is another great benefit we receive from the assets of this country, and for this reason, every municipality, from Tropoja to Konispol, from Shijak to Voskopoja, must have its own seasonal plan.

And here I will close this introduction to our discussion and I will give the floor to the Minister of Tourism to begin with the beaches, then to the Minister of Economy to touch on some aspects, and naturally at the end, before we open the discussion, to the leader of this process of transforming the relationship and approach of local government, as a complementary approach with the government and as a force that, if it does the right thing, can bring the country’s economy far more than it has brought so far.

Continuation of Prime Minister Rama’s discussion at the meeting with the mayors in Durrës

Prime Minister Edi Rama: We will talk later, in the discussion session, about another important component in this process, which is the Diaspora. The Diaspora not only as a potential for investment, but the Diaspora as an inseparable part of our people, of our communities, and it will be very important to have your engagement, all of you, both for the organization of the Diaspora Summit in the spring, where every recommendation from your side will be very valuable regarding the people you think should be invited to this summit, but also regarding how we will approach it and keep the community of each municipality abroad an ever more integrated part of the daily life of the community, and an informed part regarding developments in the respective community, and of course in the whole country as well.

Now I will give the floor to the Minister of Economy and Innovation to address, from the perspective of the ministry, the aspects that relate to what I touched on in my remarks regarding economic development, but also to give you some information regarding the mechanisms and the instruments available that we can use and must use jointly. These are instruments that range from the familiar ones in support of farmers or in support of infrastructure, to new instruments such as the Albanian Development Bank, which has now entered into operation. The board has been established, the head of the bank has been selected, a well-known figure for the entire banking sector, who has agreed to take on this role in this first phase of the bank’s development. He is an Italian citizen, but also Albanianized, and our development bank has been twinned with the Italian development bank, so “Cassa Depositi e Prestiti” is a financial institution more than 100 years old with extraordinary experience, and it has been, from the very first day of the conception of the development bank, a companion of the government and has worked closely, from the first day of the conception of the bank, with Delina, who today covers the field of economy and innovation as minister. So, Delina, the floor is yours.

Prime Minister Edi Rama: I think that going into the depth of the issues should be left to the discussion session. Ervin touched on it at the end of his remarks, which is the information, awareness raising, and engagement of the municipalities for the preparation that is needed in relation to the accession negotiations and to Albania as a member of the European Union.

I have the concern that not everyone at the leadership level, in both levels of governance, has a sufficiently clear idea of what challenges await the country and the citizens of this country and entrepreneurship in this country, with Albania’s entry into the European Union.

Precisely because some of the challenges are extraordinarily complex and heavy, the European Union has a mechanism that enables new member countries to benefit from transitional periods in order to be ready to be subjected to the same rules as the other member countries. And of course, the heaviest challenge that other countries before us have also faced, Croatia, for example, received a 10-year transitional phase, and let me say it frankly, I do not believe that Croatia has had as many problems as we have with the environment, it is the field of the environment.

If everything goes according to the plan agreed with the Commission, and if we are capable enough to close the negotiations at the end of 2027, it will take another 2 years to carry out the ratifications in all member states, and in 2030 Albania will sit at the table of the European Union, and it will have another 10 plus years to be ready to submit to all the rules of the European Union related to the environment. So 15 years from today! It seems like a lot, but if you look at what it is about, it is very few years.

Meanwhile, another heavy challenge that other countries have gone through with transitional phases, we are trying to gain a 5-year transitional phase, which is the maximum we can take, is food safety. Which means that we must be aware of this today, and we must work from today for this, so that our farmers and our enterprises in the countryside are clear, and if they are not ready, they have no other road except to pull down the shutter.

Of course, said like this, it seems impossible, but if you look at the reality of the countryside today, the fact that there are enterprises that export and have no contestation regarding the quality of their production means that this is possible. But if today this is a fact for the elite enterprises of agriculture, tomorrow it will be a fact for every person who produces tomatoes and sells them in the village market.

The transformation of these years is very big compared to where we were, but compared to what awaits us, it is insufficient, and therefore, we must be very aware of this, and this requires engagement at the local level.

This requires that all municipalities cross that boundary of the mentality that the municipality functions in the countryside as a communal enterprise: cleaning, lighting, infrastructure, school, kindergarten, nursery, health centers, cleaning of canals, yes, canals are cleaned, work has been done in this direction by the municipalities, but it has nothing to do with agricultural development, livestock development, rural development, agro processing.

There is no need to go to Spain or to go to Poland; it is enough to go to Greece and see that every municipality has partnerships with private actors in agrotourism structures, in agro-processing structures. It is a partner there, the municipality, and it earns revenue.

So, for this issue of accession, we will need to discuss, and we will need to create a working system. Here is also the director of SASPAC, which is the National State Agency for the Coordination of Assistance, it is called assistance but in fact it coordinates foreign financing, and for this reason there should also be, through the academy, through the Minister for Local Government, more active information from your side regarding the opportunities that have been benefited from European Union funds. And here is also the minister herself, who is also the chief negotiator, who will speak in the next session about the dimension of the economy and local governance in the whole negotiation process and in the integration process.

Now, in closing, I want to say that it is time to create a joint working group between the government and the municipalities to address all these problems and to put them in order both in the regulatory aspect, meaning what the government needs to do, the measures, what the parliament needs to do, what we need to do together with the municipal councils, etc., and in the aspect of problems of different natures that you consider reasonable to be addressed.

From the government’s side, I would propose that this group be chaired by the Minister for Local Government, and that it include the Minister of Economy, the Minister of Culture and Tourism, as well as the Minister of the Environment.

From your side: the Mayor of Lezhë, the Mayor of Maliq, the Mayor of Shkodër, the Mayor of Himara, the Mayor of Durrës, and the Mayor of Roskovec. This group should deal with specific issues under the leadership of the Minister for Local Government, and then the Minister for Local Government, with the group’s formed opinion on any issue, will address the government for changes in government decisions, for changes in laws, for issuing new orders, and for creating new synergies related to what I said about the entrepreneurial state.

So we can close this session here. After a break, we can begin the session of concrete discussions for all these fields, benefiting also from the presence of several main leaders who will make their references not long, but necessary. Then the way will be opened for discussions.

Thank you very much!