The Tivat Municipal Assembly (MA) Service does not have data on how many times each councilor in the current convocation of the local parliament gave presentations and spoke in total at local parliament sessions in that city.
Almost all other local council services, as well as those in the state parliament, keep precise records in hours and minutes of how many councilors or deputies spoke at parliamentary sessions, as well as the number of times each of them spoke individually. If someone wants to find out the same thing when it comes to the Tivat parliament, they will have to go through all the minutes of the sessions held so far or, with a stopwatch in one hand and a pen in the other, listen to dozens of hours of audio recordings of all the twenty sessions of the current convocation of the Tivat parliament held so far.
"The Assembly Service does not keep records of the number of appearances at Assembly sessions and the total length of individual presentations by all councilors who were, or are still, in the current convocation constituted on December 2.12.2022, XNUMX, in any special format, but rather records of councilor participation are kept through the minutes of the sessions, which are regularly published on the website. The website also contains audio recordings of all sessions held," the local parliament, headed by the president of the Assembly, told "Vijesti". Miljan Marković (New).
The absence of such records, by the way, is a direct violation of Article 59 of the Rules of Procedure of the Tivat Municipal Assembly, which stipulates that "records shall be kept of the work of councilors" from which the data shall be "published on the Assembly's website, in the bulletin and in other ways."
"The records referred to in paragraph 1 contain data on: the presence of councilors at sessions of the Assembly, attendance at sessions of working bodies, the number of meetings held with representatives of citizens and the civil sector, absence from sessions of the Assembly and working bodies (justified or unjustified or as a result of a party decision), the number of proposals or initiatives submitted, the number of accepted or rejected proposals, the number of discussions at sessions, the list of issues that were considered at sessions of the Assembly, the list of issues that could not be considered at the Assembly due to lack of a quorum, the duration of the sessions, the number and duration of sessions of working bodies," it is written in that article of the Rules of Procedure.
Since there are no official records, the subjective impression of journalists who follow the sessions of the Tivat parliament, or citizens who listen to the broadcasts of the sessions on the local public service Radio Tivat, remains, according to which the opposition councilors, consisting of DPS, SDP, SD, LP and HGI, in the Tivat Municipal Assembly are incomparably more active and willing to discuss than their colleagues from the government, consisting of councilors from the civic lists Narod pobjeđuje, Tivatska akcija, Krtoljska lista and Bokeški forum, and the political parties Nova, PES, Demokrata and DSS.
According to activity at municipal council sessions, the opposition is in the lead Vatroslav Belan (LP), Igor Petkovic (SD), Adrian Vuksanovic i Ana Vuksanović (HGI), the Dubravka Nikčević and to some extent Renata Bergam Grandis (DPS) and I'm talking to Lisičić (SDP). Of the ruling parties, the one who is by far the most willing to discuss at the municipal council sessions, sometimes not only with the opposition but also with colleagues from the ruling coalition, is Sanja Vuković (Tivat Action), and somewhat more active are Sandra Sindik (Bokek Forum), Tonći Janović (PES), Petar Samardzic (The people win), Dejan Risancić (DSS) and the president of the Municipal Assembly Miljan Marković (Nova).
The activities of most other councilors at municipal council sessions are reduced to the protocol reading of reports from the municipal council working bodies they chair regarding the positions taken by those working bodies on the agenda items to be discussed at the plenum, and raising their hands when voting. Therefore, most of the “political clinch”, i.e. polemics and responses to attacks by the opposition, at municipal council sessions, instead of councilors from the ruling majority, must be carried out by the leaders of the local executive, the Mayor of the Municipality. Željko Komnenović (The people are hurting) and the vice president Jovan Brinic (Krtoljska list).
There are councilors on both sides of the parliament who have not spoken at the municipal council sessions since December 2012, nor have the citizens of Tivat who follow the broadcasts of the sessions had the opportunity to hear the tone of these councilors' voices.
The Statute of the Municipal Assembly does not say anything about whether councilors who do not perform their duties or do not attend sessions of the Municipal Assembly and working bodies should be sanctioned in any way. There are no such penal provisions in the Rules of Procedure either, which means that representatives of the people in the Tivat parliament can, without any restrictions or consequences, not appear at sessions or working bodies of the Municipal Assembly. The only measure that unscrupulous councilors will feel in their pockets is the denial of councilor's compensation for the months in which they were unjustifiably absent from the Municipal Assembly sessions or boycotted its work for political reasons, or the daily allowance for participation in sessions of working bodies, if they were unjustifiably absent from them.
The Municipal Council did not provide data on which of the Tivat councilors has been most unjustifiably absent from Municipal Council sessions in the past two years.
Since the ruling coalition has a slim majority of 17 councilors compared to 15 opposition councilors, government councilors are literally forced to constantly come to the municipal council sessions in order to ensure the adoption of decisions proposed by the executive branch, while the opposition is in a much more relaxed position. Therefore, it is not surprising that the information announced by the Municipal Council Service that in the past period they have been absent from the Tivat municipal council sessions the most times (officially justified) Aleksandar Djurovic, (SDP) Adrijan Vuksanovic, Zdravko Mitrović (SD), Nebojša Kašcelan (DPS), Igor Petkovic, Ilija Janović (HGI), Ana Vuksanović, Ana Ivanović (DPS), Vatroslav Belan (LP) and Andrija Petkovic (Bokeški Forum) who was a councilor at the beginning of the convocation, before being appointed Vice President of the Municipality.
"The most absentees from working body sessions were Aleksandar Đurović, Adrijan Vuksanović, Zdravko Mitrović, Ilija Janović, Julija Samardzic (DPS), Igor Petkovic, Ilko Klakor (KL), Dubravka Nikčević, Milos Popivoda (DPS) and Vatroslav Belan," the local parliament announced.
Although some councilors, such as the head of the Tivat SDP and vice president of the SDP of Montenegro Aleksandar Đurović, who have not attended sessions of the Municipal Assembly and its working bodies of which he is a member for more than a year in a row, often absent themselves, claiming that this is justified, the President of the Municipal Assembly Miljan Marković points out that he has no statutory or procedural powers to punish them for this, or to deny them the payment of councilor fees.
According to official records published on the Municipality's website, councilors in the Tivat Municipal Assembly receive a monthly compensation that individually ranges from 270 to 414 euros, depending on whether or not they are also members of one of the working bodies of the local parliament and how many sessions of those bodies were held. The January gross salary of the President of the Municipal Assembly, Miljan Marković, was 1.658 euros.
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