PM Citu: PNRR will not have projects that take long to carry through

Prime Minister Florin Citu said on Thursday that moving forward he will deal with cutting through red tape so that the procedures for the implementation of projects under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) will be faster and within five years the money received will be spent. In Arad on Thursday evening to attend a meeting of the Council for Regional Development of the Vest Region, Citu addressed the four chairs of county councils in the region and several mayors in attendance present, to whom he presented the main PNRR components. "We have projects at different stages of preparation and we have three sources of funding: the national budget, which we all know; there are European funds - and here I agree that things in the went weak, to say the least, but also because of legislation, the way work used to be done, and red tape, which we all complain about, but nothing has been done in these years, and it is our duty to change things moving forward, very soon - and of course there is PNRR," said Citu. He pointed out that there is a clear deadline for investment under the PNRR, namely 2026. "In PNRR, an important condition was projects to be mature so that they can be carried through by 2026. You cannot go to the European Commission with projects that are historically completed in six, seven, eight years and say that you do them in three years after you have never done such a project in Romania, so you have no history that you can do such a project," said Citu. According to him, "the goal is to take the 29.2 billion euros" and the local administrations must move "very well and very efficiently" to spend the PNRR funds. The PM said it would be a challenge for all to cut through red tape so that projects could be completed on time. "The bureaucracy we are talking about has a component in the central administration that I will deal with, but it also has a component in you, which you have to take care of. We all need to cut through red tape so that we can attract the money, so that we can to benefit from that money," Citu told the attending local public administration officials. At the end of the meeting, Citu also paid a short visit to PNL Arad. AGERPRES (RO - author: Marian Buga, editor: Antonia Nita; EN - author: Corneliu-Aurelian Colceriu, editor: Cristina Zaharia)