The General Council of the Capital adopted the Bucharest City Budget Draft for 2018, which provides for expenditures of 6.2 billion lei and total revenues of 5.7 billion, supplemented by the 560 million lei surplus from previous years. The RADET district heating company got 76 million lei for investments and 397 million lei in subsidies.

The total revenues of the City Hall were projected at 5.7 billion lei, of which own revenues of 4.4 billion lei (77.52%), subsidies from other budgets (11.6%), amounts received from the European Union and Cohesion Fund (10.44%), according to Agerpres and economica.net. More than 3.9 billion lei (63.56% of the total expenditures) are allocated to the functioning of the municipality, and over 2.2 billion lei (36.44%) are provided for development.

Rehabilitation of the district heating system

Mayor Gabriela Firea said that the district heating system consists of 890 kilometers of pipelines, of which only 174 km have been rehabilitated in the last 15 years. To reduce the number of failures, about 63.24 kilometers of primary network pipelines have to be rehabilitated as a matter of urgency, and for this money from the budget will be allocated. The works will be carried out by the Bucharest Municipal Energy Company.

Investments funded under the High Infrastructure Operational Program will cover 200 kilometers of primary network pipelines, but the procedures for accessing European non-reimbursable funds need longer, said Gabriel Firea.

The Mayor also said that € 56 million will be allocated to improve the road system, intelligent traffic light and traffic management (20 new traffic lights and 100 intersections integrated into the traffic management system, and a Smart Parking application worth five million euro).