Mizil

Starting situation

The city of Mizil is facing some problems regarding the decrease of population, due to the lack of jobs, determined by the privation and bad management of local companies, but also by economic crisis. Thus, part of the skilled people migrated to the bigger cities in the neighborhood of Mizil. The same trend was also for the young people that are attending universities and vocational schools in bigger city and then are not coming back to the city. Till the beginning of 2000, in the public administration, due to the perpetuation of practices from the communist period, the strategy was a top-down procedure, not taking into account the needs and desires of citizens, that only should accept the strategic measures proposed by the municipality. Even if in the latest year the procedure changed and the strategy is now a bottom-up approach, the feed-back of citizens is slow. The municipality is looking the right means to address and to involve as much as possible the civil society, companies and all individual citizens in the future of the city.

Main challenges

The main challenge faced by the city is to create conditions for attracting new people and reducing unemployment. For achieving this objective, the City Council is trying to apply a bottom-up approach involving the civil society in the policy-making and innovation processes. However, the feedback of citizens is slow. There are needed innovative models and tools to engage people in the strategic decisions of the city. The official mission of Mizil is “At your service, citizen” which means that the municipality is totally engaged in identifying and answering to community needs.