Page 101 - Proceeding 2015

TUDOSE (IORGA) Elena FAMP
SHIFTING TO PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT IN MUNICIPAL PUBLIC UTILITY SERVICES: A
CCASP
BRIEF RECENT HISTORY OF BENCHMARKING IN ROMANIA

benchmarking for the public utility sector in Romania we can understand first that this process is to some
extent an artificial and non-voluntarily one, as it relies most on legislation and imposed standards rather
than on a genuine need identified by the public sector to perform better in public service delivery.
PROCEEDINGS OF THE 11 TH ADMINISTRATION AND PUBLIC MANAGEMENT INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
2. PATHS TO BENCHMARKING FOR PUBLIC UTILITY SERVICES – ROMANIAN CASE

The broader concept of performance management in relationship to public administration and the
decentralization process has been explicitly introduced for the first time in in Romania in 2006, through

two main pieces of legislation:

? Law 195/2006 on decentralization;

? Law 273/2006 on local public finances.

Initially, benchmarking, as foeseen by the two pieces of legislation, was focused on the minimal threshold

that public services delivered by local governments should not fall under, namely the minimum quality
30 th – 31 st October 2015 ”Strategic Management for Local Communities” Bucharest resources allocated to local budgets for providing a certain public utility services (currently available in
standards and minimum cost standards – normative costs used for determined the quantum of financial

education, social services).

Most prominent achievements in developing tools for strategic planning for local public administration in
Romania were included in the National Strategy for Accelerating the Development of Public Utilities

Services (Government Decision no. 246/2006). This Strategy introduces for the first time the concept of
key performance indicators for monitoring/evaluating the quality of public services delivered by LPAs.

The Strategy provisioned the introduction of urban audit used by Eurostat for providing information and

comparable measurement on the different aspects on the quality of urban life in European cities.

Following the adoption of the Strategy, the Government (through the Ministry for Regional Development
and Public Administration) has supervised the efforts of developing standardized tools (log-frames) for

collecting information from over 3,300 LPAs on quality and cost parameters for local public services, as
well as for monitoring implementation of local development strategies. In this context, under the direct
supervision of the Ministry, a set of survey instruments have been developed for:

1. Monitoring implementation of local strategies, with a particular focus on general interest
services/investments

2. Assessing the quality and costs of general interest services provided by LPAs (water & sewage,

sanitation, public lighting, central heating, local public transportation)

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