People holding the most important positions in local government had until April 30, 2026, to submit asset declarations reflecting their situation as of December 31, 2025. Almost three months have passed since that deadline, yet the Public Information Bulletin of Bolesławiec City Hall still does not contain a complete set of current annual declarations.
These include, among others, the documents of Bolesławiec City Council members, the mayor and deputy mayors, the treasurer, the secretary, people issuing administrative decisions, heads of municipal units, and members of the governing bodies of municipal companies.
The city’s Public Information Bulletin has separate sections devoted to declarations from City Hall, the City Council, budgetary units, municipal cultural institutions, and single-member municipal companies. The problem is that, on July 26, residents still could not find there the complete annual set of documents showing assets and income for 2025.
The documents are public.
The Act on Municipal Self-Government clearly states that councillors, the mayor, and other persons subject to the requirement submit subsequent asset declarations every year by April 30. The documents present the state of their assets as of December 31 of the previous year.
The regulations require the public part of the declarations to be made available in the Public Information Bulletin. The law does not specify a particular deadline, such as seven or fourteen days after submission. This does not mean, however, that the office may delay publication for an arbitrarily long time. The documents should be made available without undue delay.
The county has published them; the city is still making residents wait.
A comparison with the county government headed by Tomasz Gabrysiak shows that publishing the documents does not have to take many months. The Public Information Bulletin of Bolesławiec County already contains declarations for 2025, including those of the county head, deputy county head, chair of the County Council, and councillors. Some of them were published on June 16.
Why, then, can city residents still not learn the current information about the assets of the people managing Bolesławiec and municipal property?
It is difficult to argue that the scale or technical complexity of the task is an obstacle. The declarations must be prepared for publication by concealing confidential data, scanned, and placed in the appropriate sections of the Public Information Bulletin. The office did this in previous years and has both the staff and a functioning IT system to handle it.
The mayor and the council chair are responsible.
Councillors submit their declarations to the chair of the City Council. In Bolesławiec, this position is held by Łukasz Jaźwiec. The chair accepts and reviews the councillors’ documents.
The mayor, deputy mayors, officials, heads of units, and people managing municipal companies are subject to the relevant procedures set out in the law. Ultimately, the public parts of the documents should be placed in the city’s Public Information Bulletin, whose operation is overseen by the office headed by mayor Piotr Roman.
Neither the chair of the City Council nor the mayor should treat publishing asset declarations as an insignificant administrative task. It is one of the fundamental mechanisms of public oversight over people exercising authority and managing public money.
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What does the city have to hide?
The absence of the documents is not proof that anyone is hiding assets or failed to submit a declaration on time. Residents do, however, have the right to ask why information that is public by law has not been made available to them for almost three months.
Did all persons subject to the requirement submit their documents by April 30? Has the office completed checking and anonymizing them? Who decided that residents should have to wait so long? When will the full set of declarations be published?
Transparency does not mean making documents available when it is convenient for the authorities. If the declarations were properly submitted, the city should show them without delay. If problems, delays, or omissions occurred, residents should also be informed about that.
Almost three months is enough time to prepare and publish the documents. Further delay increasingly resembles disregard for residents’ right to oversee the people managing the city, its units, and municipal property.