Members of United Russia examined the work of Vladimir Putin's public reception rooms.
At a regular meeting of the General Council Presidium yesterday, the leaders of United Russia got together to make preparations for March elections and discuss the Party's projects and public reception rooms.
It should be mentioned, of course, that United Russia's reception rooms are also Vladimir Putin's rooms. They were set up by United Russia's regional departments. As Mikhail Babich, Chairman of the Commission of the General Council's Presidium for Consideration of Citizens' Addresses explained to party leader Vladimir Putin, about 35-50 issues are reported to Mr Putin monthly, while other issues are resolved in the reception rooms.
Last year, the public reception rooms were in an ongoing competition with each other to determine which one is the most efficient. The amount of work made absolutely no difference: the bigger the entity is, the more employees work in the reception room. The contest was divided into two stages, and the reception rooms were evaluated using 20 different criteria. "It was complicated, multi-tiered work. We examined every reception room at least four times. The number of citizens admitted was a separate component, not because we need a huge number of visitors, but because this criteria is directly connected with the number of problems that have been solved positively. Clearly, if the regional department is able to resolve issues, then people will go there," Mr Babich explained. A number of United Russia's amendments to regulatory and legal framework at all three levels of power (federal, regional, municipal), prompted by appeals from citizens, were also compared with each other. Mr Babich pointed out that the number of appeals signed personally by Mr Putin testifies to the scale and publicity of the problems which had been resolved in the region.
"There should be no unexamined issues left at the reception room; the response can't always be positive, but it should always be made in a comprehensive, professional and timely manner," Mr Babich said.
At the end of the contest, the reception rooms of Kostroma, Krasnoyarsk, St Petersburg, Primorye, Rostov, Samara and Sverdlovsk were declared the winners. Employees in the Vladimir Region, Dagestan, Kemerov, Pskov, Ryazan and Saratov also earned special mention and will receive a certificate of merit for their hard work.
In three other regions, however, the heads of the reception rooms were forced to resign under the delicate heading "transition to another job". According to Mr Babich, this may simply mean a promotion, bumping heads of the reception rooms up to heads of regional departments. "Sometimes we just need to rotate personnel, and that certainly doesn't mean that the person is somehow bad, just that he doesn't fit in and would probably do much better in some other field. The head of the reception room must be a person whom visitors seeking advice listen to, and also a person whom the representatives of authorities who have to solve the problems listen to. In fact, we have some reception rooms with a rate of positively resolved matters at almost 40%, while figures for certain other reception rooms are only about 15-17%."
Apart from that, the General Council's Presidium listened to a report by Head of United Russia's Central Executive Committee Andrei Vorobyov about the party's projects. Both he and Deputy Secretary of the General Council's Presidium for Creativity Yury Shuvalov are set to analyse the conditions of the projects. According to Mr Shuvalov, the project Buy Russian Products may be combined with another project, the National Innovation System.
Yesterday, the General Council's Presidium passed a decision to set up the Public Council in cooperation with experts and the mass media. Head of the Political Conjuncture Centre Alexei Chesnakov will be in charge of the project.
Zakatnova Anna