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ROUND TABLE ON THE CITY BUDGET

The round table on the topic of how to make the city budget more participatory and transparent was held at Nis City Hall.  The organizers of this meeting were the Center for Development of the Civil Society Protekta and the City of Nis. The idea of ​​this round table was to bring together the representatives of city and municipal institutions, civil society organizations and the media in one place so that all together could look at the problems of drafting and spending the city budget, the existing activities and the dynamics of drafting the budget for 2019. Nis City Mayor Darko Bulatovic said that such meetings were one of the ways to hear the opinions of all those who want to get involved in the process of budgeting. “I spent two months with my associates visiting the citizens in the farthest villages to hear their proposals when it comes to the budget,” the Mayor said, and announced several other public hearings before passing the most important city act. The idea of ​​this round table was to create new mechanisms for involving citizens in proposing and civic monitoring of the city budget expenditures. The examples of good practice from Serbia on the topic of citizen participation in budgeting were presented.