Click Here
to read other
Eurasia Foundation
Grantee Profiles

A Eurasia Foundation Grantee Profile

More Effective, Less Expensive:
Streamlining Local Government in Nogliki, Sakhalin

By Tatiana Pisareva, Vladivostok Regional Office

Gennady Susenko has been mayor of Nogliki since 1997 and knows well the problems of running a city government. "We stood up for our right to be independent from national regulation time and time again," says Susenko, "even though we ourselves had no idea of what local self-government should be like. Now I realize that we couldn’t see the opportunities that were in front of us. The project to improve local self-government in Nogliki really opened our eyes."

"Self-government" is a new concept for Russia, giving city and regional administrations the freedom to regulate without the supervision of the national government. An advantage of this new stage in Russia’s evolving public sector is that more citizens are able to participate in decision-making at the community level. Yet many disadvantages remain: inappropriate, outdated laws continue to hinder local administrations; officials are often poorly trained and inexperienced in decision-making; and city and regional offices often have vague, overlapping, or even contradictory roles. To keep these disadvantages to a minimum, local governments are reorganizing to meet new responsibilities inherited from the national government.

Nogliki sits at the far north of Sakhalin Island off of Russia’s east coast—about 600 kilometers from the largest city, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. Nogliki is a remote town, but the problems that its administration faces in its transition to self-government are shared by city governments throughout Russia. For example, obscure budget obligations are forcing Nogliki to pay pensions and public assistance from the local budget, despite the fact that responsibility for these payments traditionally lies with the national government. These payments and other obligations, emphasizes Mayor Susenko, placed a heavy burden on the Nogliki government. "We were constantly running out of money and couldn’t even afford the basics: fixing up the schools, building roads, putting up apartment buildings."

In June 1998, Nogliki received a $19,622 grant from the Eurasia Foundation and the Sakhalin Energy Investment Company to improve the efficiency of its local government. The goals of the project were to put together a retraining program for the administration officials; to reform the local government’s structure; and to develop more effective and relevant laws.

The Nogliki administration invited Nina Polichka, head of the Far-Eastern Legal Resources Center and a former Foundation grantee, to join the project. Having already launched a number of innovative educational programs to raise standards for local government, Polichka was able to contribute both her experience and her understanding of the subject matter to the project. The seminars conducted by the Nogliki administration provided 37 local government officials with the opportunity to take a full course in the principles of self-government, to master skills needed to draft legislation, and to apply their knowledge in drafting the Nogliki Charter and statutes regulating the work of the local government’s departments.

Today local governments are forced to use their funds sparingly, and few can pay for the services of highly qualified advisors or consultants. The retraining program for the administration employees has brought about the long-term view that they can use local resources to improve the structure, and therefore the effectiveness, of their offices. In Nogliki, the administration officials will be able to solve problems by themselves.

As one of the project’s greatest accomplishments, the local Nogliki government underwent a complete reorganization in the spring of 1999. The project team studied the government’s organizational structure and concluded that many divisions had vague or absent objectives and that an incoherent structure had led to ineffectiveness at almost all levels. "The Soviet bureaucracy was notorious for its inflated staffs, which we inherited," says Nadezhda Prikhodko, the project’s director. "But recently we’ve set new goals, taking a new look at the roles and responsibilities of civil servants. By 1999, we decided that we absolutely had to make the structure meet our needs."

As a result of the project, the government was able to eliminate its redundant departments and avoid having multiple offices repeat the same tasks unnecessarily. For example, the Departments of Economy, Trade, Prices and Tariffs, and Consumer Rights all merged into the single Department of Economic Policy, which now serves both public welfare and economic development in Nogliki. This conglomeration cut the total number of staff by 40 percent. The Nogliki officials are enthusiastic about the reforms, pointing out that, "When we got rid of the redundant and unnecessary departments, we got rid of the red tape. The local government started working more effectively, and at almost three times less the cost."

Although the project team had already completed a great deal of work, they went on to create materials for other Sakhalin districts to use in solving their own local government problems. The Tymovsky, Smirnykhovsky, and Anivsky Districts have expressed interest in collaborating with the Nogliki administration to share the experience it gained through the project.

According to Nina Polichka, the project is sure to have a strong impact on the entire system of self-government in the Russian Far East. "The Nogliki administration had the challenge of taking the first step and defining the role of local self-government—a step that proved to be pivotal for the entire community," says Polichka. "The reforms in Nogliki are a valuable and successful experiment for everyone."

February 2000

This document (c) 2001, The Eurasia Foundation.
Direct questions or comments to webmaster@eurasia.org.