At the National Conference to study, study, thoroughly grasp and implement the Resolution of the 3rd Conference of the 14th Central Executive Committee of the Party held on July 29, General Secretary and President To Lam stated clearly that the Central Government does not raise the issue of rearranging and adjusting the administrative boundaries of communes, because basically the entire system is operating stably and effectively.
Provinces and cities that find it truly necessary to adjust, based on the Party's guidelines, the State's laws, planning, management practices and the legitimate aspirations of the people, propose to competent authorities to decide.
In this context, many grassroots civil servants expressed support for the policy of continuing to adjust if it helps improve the operational efficiency of the apparatus.
Mr. Nguyen Van Truong, an official in a commune in Vinh Long province, said that the merger will create conditions to reorganize the apparatus towards specialization, instead of letting civil servants concurrently hold many fields as they are now.
According to Mr. Truong, currently each commune and ward only has a few specialized departments, but the workload is very large, causing many civil servants to take on many tasks at the same time.
When personnel are concentrated in a larger unit, each person can be in charge of a specialized field. Thus, the quality of work processing will be much better than both making documents and solving work at the grassroots level," Mr. Truong shared.
From his work experience, he believes that this model can operate similarly to the previous district level, when each civil servant was in charge of a separate professional area such as legal propaganda, handling administrative violations or dossiers with foreign elements. The assignment according to expertise will help shorten the time to process work and improve the efficiency of advice.
However, Mr. Truong also said that continuing the arrangement will pose no small challenges in management and organizational structure.
Each leader has a different management style, so civil servants need time to adapt, sometimes it takes about 6 months to a year to stabilize," he said.
From an expert's perspective, Master of Public Policy Nguyen Tuan Anh assessed that not arranging simultaneously but assigning localities to proactively propose is a remarkable change in administrative reform thinking.
According to him, if previously the arrangement was mainly based on criteria on area and population size, now the approach has given more importance to practical governance factors and the specific development of each locality.
Experts believe that the biggest benefit of this approach is to promote the proactiveness of the provincial-level government, because this is the level that best understands the geographical, historical, cultural, infrastructure and development needs of each commune and ward. When empowered to propose appropriate plans, localities will have conditions to build more practical organizational models, while limiting unnecessary disruptions to people and the provision of public services.
However, he also noted that stronger decentralization requires localities to have the capacity to analyze, forecast and develop transparent plans. Therefore, localities are flexible in organizing implementation to ensure the unity of the system based on the framework of criteria and general principles issued by the Central Government, and at the same time have a monitoring mechanism.
