On Friday, 5 November, a press conference was held at the seat of the Bolesławiec County Office, attended by the starosta Cezary Przybylski, deputy starosta Stanisław Chwojnicki, Chair of the County Council Karol Stasik and member of the Bolesławiec County Board Dariusz Kwaśniewski. The meeting was intended to sum up the third term of the county local government.
“During the first term, more than 19 km of roads and pavements were built, and during the second, more than 46 km. Meanwhile, during the current term we have built more than 88 km of roads and pavements,” Cezary Przybylski stressed.
During this term, the local government obtained more than PLN 29.5 million in EU funding. “But the amounts are not what matters; this was not a race for money,” Dariusz Kwaśniewski noted. “We sought EU funding when we believed that the money would be used to build sensible things.
“Bolesławiec County is currently a leading county,” the starosta said during Friday’s meeting. “During this term, we received the Lower Silesian Key to Success and the Lower Silesian Griffin. What is more, our local government ranks 18th in the ranking of the Association of Polish Counties.
They also discussed how the County Board had managed to stabilize the situation at the Bolesławiec hospital. “At the end of the first term, the county hospital recorded a loss of more than PLN 17.6 million; at the end of the second, more than PLN 17.3 million. We will end this term, however, with a profit of more than PLN 5 million,” Przybylski stated.
The starosta also addressed the idea of building a new hospital. “I do not see such a need,” he said. “I also disagree with claims that the Hospital Emergency Department [został uruchomiony w tej kadencji – przyp. red.] is outdated. I would even venture to say that it is the most modern department in all of Lower Silesia.
Dariusz Kwaśniewski joined the discussion: “The current president used a rather vivid metaphor in one of his interviews. He said that our work on modernizing the ED amounted to modernizing an old Trabant. In his view, even if we replaced the engine and gave the vehicle a facelift, it would still only be a Trabant. I would respond as follows: we are not fans of taking on excessive debt, because we are spending not our own money, but the residents’ money. Besides, the balance sheet of the County Board’s work during the first term [wówczas starostą był Piotr Roman – przyp. red.] was not even a Trabant, but a skateboard without wheels. Moreover, I believe that the measures we took were purposeful, sensible and substantive. One cannot set out to build everything from scratch.
Following this principle, the County Board abandoned plans to build a completely new county office headquarters. The local government is to renovate and expand the former middle school building at 12 Armii Krajowej Street. “It turned out that if we wanted to build the kind of facility we dreamed of, we would have to spend PLN 40 million on it,” Kwaśniewski noted. “But we match our ambitions to our means. One should not take on debt merely to make things look nice; above all, it has to be sensible.
The local government officials also spoke about cooperation within the PO-SLD-PSL coalition. “Ideology was not of fundamental importance here. We set priorities for ourselves and implemented them together; politics was pushed into the background,” Karol Stasik said. “I would like to dispel the myth that we are controlled from above. If someone becomes a councillor representing a political party, that does not mean they are incapacitated and must carry out orders from activists in Wrocław or Warsaw. That would be absurd,” Kwaśniewski stressed. “It is worth noting that during this term no county office employee was dismissed for political reasons, which had occurred in previous terms,” Stanisław Chwojnicki added.
(information ii)