There will be no more Hungarian cities

According to origo.hu, no Hungarian settlements will get town title, but 23 villages applied for it. The final decision will be made by the President. Among the settlements applying for the town title, 7500 people live in the largest and          just over a thousand in the smallest.

“Magyarszek – The most natural village!” The 1043-people settlement of Baranya defines itself so in its website, which applied for the title of town with 22 other villages this year.

The local authorities had to handed the application for declaration of city until January. The applications are reviewed by a committee of 7 seven members in the first round – the Central Statistical Office, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the Municipalities National Association, the Hungarian Village Association, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the representatives of the Prime Minister’s Office participate in the work.

Based on the opinion of board, the Minister of the Prime Minister’s Office proposes to the President, who will decide on this basis.

The preparatory committee has already done with the work, and origo.hu knows none of the 23 settlements would get the town status. There’s just not least because the government amended retroactively the terms of the declaration of town: to obtain the title, the population must reach 10 thousand people. Even Erdokertes, the most-populous applicant only has 7541 people.

The 2011 Local Government Act provides only general terms about the criteria for declaring a city. It says the title of town can be awarded to a municipal government which plays a regional role and its level of development reaches the level of an average city.

However, the 2012 government regulation amended in March made the expectations more tangible.

Thus, a municipality can play a regional role, if at least 20% of the workers come from another settlement. The average level of a city also has criteria, such as a population reaching 10 thousand and growing; at least 60%-sewerage; at least 90% of the city roads are paved; there are primary and secondary schools etc.

Janos Lazar, Minister of the Prime Minister’s Office said earlier if a settlement was founded round couple of hundred years ago, it was still not a city.

The Fidesz government gave only 18 settlements the town title since 2010, in 2013. However, between 2000 and 2010, 106 settlements became towns, but the development was not steady: between 2001 and 2015, not a single new town emerged in Nograd county, by contrast in Pest county, where the number of cities grew from 27 to 54. So, there are now 346 towns in Hungary.

According to the 2014 data of the Central Statistical Office, only one village meet the requirement of the population of 10 thousand people: Solymar. Moreover, only 142 of the 346 towns have larger population than 10 thousand people, origo.hu said.

From the words of Janos Lazar, we can conclude that the government doesn’t want to increase the number of towns.

More than half of the towns got the title after the regime change, in the last quarter of the century.

based on the article of origo.hu
translated by BA

Source: http://www.origo.hu