The Municipality Stara Pazova in the Vojvodina district of Srem is ranked among the country’s most developed municipalities. In 2018, the local authorities are continuing with their constant improvements to the local investment climate and are preparing new benefits for those starting or expanding their businesses here.
The Municipality of Stara Pazova provides a significant number of services via its website, starting from a virtual registrar, via access to various registers, to the downloading of forms etc. Which services are most sought among citizens?
– The Municipality’s official website is very well-visited, and many citizens use it to inform themselves about all important developments on a daily basis.
The virtual registrar has been available since April 2014, and to date, it has been used to issue 1,044 confirmation of citizenship requests. Moreover, the online ordering of application and request forms have been available to citizens for four years already. They are regularly updated, and since its creation, that webpage has been visited 39,500 times.
The municipal website is also linked directly to official social networking profiles and is also optimised for access via smart devices and tablets.
I would also highlight the Quick Response Office section, where utilities and communal services problems can be reported online.
Your municipality has been known for its private entrepreneurship for decades. How interested are businesspeople in using eServices? Can they expect some new benefits in 2018?
– For all those wanting to expand operations or invest capital in our municipality, we created – together with the Office for Local Economic Development – the website ‘Invest in Pazova’, investirajteupazovu.rs, which contains a complete database of all companies registered on our territory, a list of all industrial zones, vacant land plots etc. It is visited by a large number of businesspeople because they can also use it to access information about all current economic developments in the country and around the world.
To the best of our knowledge, no other municipality in Serbia has such a practise. We are awaited by a major undertaking in the period ahead. We have begun preparation of a unique online platform and software that will enable entrepreneurs from the Stara Pazova area to register and pay taxes and other charges via the internet, but also to have round-the-clock insight into their tax obligations – payments, debts etc.
The website ‘Invest in Pazova’, investirajteupazovu.rs, contains a complete database of all companies registered on our territory, a list of all industrial zones and vacant land plots, as well as information about current economic developments
In cooperation with your neighbouring municipality of Inđija, Stara Pazova implemented the “Effective Property Management” project. How important is it to link and network data from different municipal institutions?
– Stara Pazova and Inđija are proud that we managed to set ourselves apart in competition with 123 project proposals, and that our project was assessed positively and recommended for funding. It has a total value of around 148,690 euros.
The EU Delegation provided 85 per cent of funding, with the municipalities providing the rest themselves. The programme’s goal is to contribute to strategic changes at the local level via improvements to administrative capacity and the efficiency of service provision.
Asset management support is an important prerequisite for improving the local investment climate and the legal basis for the establishment of jurisdiction and local government control over the publicly-owned property.
Basic GIS is linked to the asset management system, by which information on the availability of public property has been made available to interested parties. We have also enabled revenue growth, expenditure control, risk management, legal compliance and more efficient physical maintenance of properties.