MAP Digitization of municipalities in Dobrogea: At least 20% of localities have not accessed EU money and will not do so soon in order to get rid of the old “rail file”/ Touristic localities, poorly digitized

At least 21 of the 121 municipalities in Dobrogea have never carried out a project for the digitisation of their institution, 26 have already taken European money for this domain of activity, and 39 have tried to attract funds from the PNRR, are the conclusions of an analysis carried out by ISE based on the responses of 80 of the 121 municipalities in Dobrogea. The remaining local administrations did not respond to public requests for information. The analysis also shows that dozens of municipalities do not provide citizens with the possibility to pay taxes online and only half of them have free wi-fi in public spaces. Another conclusion is that Limanu, to which Vama Veche and 2 Mai resorts belong, is the least digitised in the region.

An ISE reader survey shows that 75% of readers consider the digitisation of services provided by local public institutions “essential” and only 8.3% “not at all important”.

Nearly 60% also consider the level of digitisation of their local town hall to be “below standard”, while the remaining 40% say it is “satisfactory”.

Also almost 60% of respondents think that the most important aspect contributing to the quality of life of citizens in this regard is the provision of online services for managing information requests or solving official requests, while 75% of readers think that it is important for municipalities in Dobrogea to focus on attracting European funds for projects in the digitization segment.

“Digitisation and European money means time and money saved”, “A digitised town hall has easier processes to control and a leaner administrative apparatus that consumes fewer resources”, or “It is enough to visit the website of each municipality to see that 99% of them are very bad at digitisation”, are some of the opinions of the readers who responded to the ISE survey.

Info Sud-Est sent requests to the 121 communes, towns and municipalities of Dobrogea regarding the process of digitisation of institutions. We wanted to find out if:

The municipalities have implemented European projects for digitisation and what was their value;

Have they submitted projects on the PNRR funding lines in this field;

Whether they still plan to develop projects on digitisation;

The security of the institution’s website is ensured;

Citizens can pay their taxes online;

The City Hall also offers other services online;

There are free Wi-Fi networks in public spaces.

Of the 121 municipalities in Dobrogea, only 80 have responded to the ISE requests. Based on the responses, we have produced a map of the digitisation of local administrations in Dobrogea.

After analysing the data, we created four categories, differentiated by colour:

black: The institution is not digitised (maximum one criterion met).

red: The institution is poorly digitised (maximum two of the criteria listed above are met)

yellow: The level of digitisation of the institution is satisfactory (three or four criteria met)

green: The degree of digitisation is high (minimum five criteria are met)

Digitisation: Zero

57 town halls in Dobrogea have an extremely low level of digitization, most of them not having any European project in this segment, the only online service they offer to citizens being the payment of taxes through the ghiseul.ro application.

Among them are two tourist municipalities, one in the heart of the Danube Delta – Crișan, the second in the south of the Romanian coast – Limanu.

Limanu is an hour’s drive from Constanța and it is best known for its two villages: 2 Mai and Vama Veche. Hundreds of hotels, guesthouses and restaurants have to physically pay their taxes at the Limanu town hall every year.

In their reply to Info Sud-Est, the town hall representatives claimed that taxes cannot be paid online in Limanu. In the meantime, a button called “Pay online” has appeared on the town hall website. Once accessed, you are redirected to the CityOn application, of which Limanu Town Hall is not a part. We tried to pay taxes to the town hall, but its name was not in the application’s database.

We called the town hall, and a clerk told us that, in fact, taxes cannot be paid through this app on the website, but that, “as far as she believes”, they can be paid through ghișeul.ro.

“Or you can get in touch with your colleagues to get an account and pay through the bank,” the woman on the other end of the line finally replied.

We also tried to clarify the problem with the mayor of Limanu, Daniel Georgescu, but he did not answer our calls.

Another town hall that has not been digitised – that of Somova, in Tulcea county – does not even have the declarations of assets and interests of local elected officials on its website.

On the other side

Municipalities marked green on the digitisation map are those that score on at least five of the set criteria. In Tulcea, the town hall of the county capital stands out, as well as Isaccea, Dorobanțu, Frecăței, Greci, Izvoarele, Jijila, Luncavița and Mihail Kogălniceanu, and in Constanța, the town halls of the county capital, Cernavodă, Hârșova, Murfatlar, Năvodari, Negru Vodă, Ovidiu, Cumpăna and Mihail Kolgălniceanu.

The 18 institutions where digitisation is at a high level compared to the average are evenly divided – nine rural settlements and nine cities.

A special case is the Năvodari Town Hall, which last year won the prize for the most digitised town hall at the Regista Gala – organised by Regista Digital SA, a company that sells solutions for digitising public administration, according to Economedia.

Năvodari Town Hall also won the award for best social media presence last year, a performance it repeated at this year’s gala.

How many town halls have accessed EU money for digitisation

26 of the 80 municipalities that responded to ISE’s questions claim to have accessed European funds for digitisation, while 39 said they have applied for funding or already have projects under implementation through the NRRP program.

The Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitisation launched the non-competitive call for projects related to the Digital Transformation and Adoption of Work Process Automation Technology in Public Administration investment of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP) at the end of March 2023, according to the ministry’s website.

The overall objective of the call is to support digital transformation, increase productivity, resilience, reduce errors and processing time of citizens’ requests to public authorities by adopting robotic work process automation – RPA – solutions and automating laborious, repetitive and rule-based tasks, according to the quoted source.

On the other hand, 21 municipalities in Dobrogea have not attracted a single euro of EU funds for digitisation, nor have they applied for NRRP money by using this findinf line. These are Ciucurova, Crișan, Horia, Jijila, Nalbant, Smârdan, Somova, Turcoaia, Eforie, 23 August, Băneasa, Cobadin, Cogealac, Comana Crucea, Limanu, Pecineaga, Saligny, Târgușor, Ostrov and Topalu.