After more than six hours of intense discussion, the Tivat Municipal Assembly today adopted the "Report on the Work of the Mayor and the Work of Local Government Bodies and Services of the Municipality of Tivat for 2025", submitted to it by Mayor Željko Komnenović (The People Win).
The report was adopted by a narrow majority with 15 votes "in favor" from the ruling coalition councilors, compared to 13 votes against. Independent councilor from the ruling majority Samandra Sindik voted, like the opposition parties, against the adoption of the report, while her ruling colleague Sanja Vuković (Tivat Action) did not express a opinion at all.
In the report, written on almost 200 pages, Komnenović praised the good work of the local administration last year, which resulted in the city budget revenue of 33,86 million euros, which is 1,43 percent more than planned, and the investment of 10,23 million euros in capital investments significant for the development of the city.
"We have many reasons to be satisfied, the capital budget implementation was 61 percent of the plan, which is the second highest percentage in the last five years, we do not have a single cent in debt to anyone, and a series of projects to improve local infrastructure have been prepared that we will implement in the coming period," Komnenović listed, among other things.
His presentation was met with harsh criticism from the opposition from the DPS, the European Union and the HGI, which accused the current Tivat city administration, led by Komnenović's civic list Narod pobjeđuje (NP), of betraying the promises made to its voters in 2020 and 2022, and of not eliminating, but rather raising to a much higher level, the irregularities and bad aspects of the work of the former DPS government and its partners.
The focus of the opposition's attention was the concession of the Tivat airport and the participation of the mayor in the Tender Commission, which declared the offer of the Korean Incheon International Airports as the best.
"Wow, you've done it, congratulations!" Vatroslav Belan (LP) told the councilors of the ruling majority, calling out the NP and the local government constituents for breaking the promises made to voters six years ago that they would prevent privatization and concession of the airport, that they would return the airport to the Municipality and protect its economic interests in managing the airport, and that the laws on local self-government, local self-government financing, and the Coastal Zone would be amended in the direction of decentralization.
"The mayor feigned some dissatisfaction with the government's moves regarding the concession, joined the Tender Commission, resigned, then withdrew and remained in the commission to work until the very end, although the government has in the meantime additionally, to the detriment of the municipalities of Tivat and Zeta, changed the legal solutions and grabbed most of the revenue from the potential airport concession for itself. Who is the parliamentary majority at the state level and who makes up the government - us or you and your coalition partners with whom you have not achieved anything for years from what you promised the people of Tivat. The time has come to pay the price because now we are comparing what was promised and what was realized," said Belan, telling Komnenović that regarding the airport concession, the mayor supported Prime Minister Milojko Spajić, who "wants to extend what the 'criminal' former regime started in 2018."
Igor Petković (SD) pointed out a number of, in his opinion, bad aspects of the current concession arrangement for airports, which the Government is insisting on with the Koreans, which he argued about with PES councilor Tonći Janović, who said that as a member of the state parliament, Janović "will vote with both hands in the Parliament of Montenegro for this concession."
Petković handed out a copy of the NP's 2020 election leaflet to everyone in the room and reminded everyone of the then-decisive promises of that civic list that "the Municipality of Tivat must receive a share in the ownership of Tivat Airport, that it must generate funds from the airport's profits, and that the airport cannot expand to over 400.000 square meters of municipal land, and that all the money should go to Podgorica."
"The sale, or concession, of Tivat Airport must be stopped because this would bring the fifteen-year-old robbery of the Municipality of Tivat and its citizens to an end. You told the citizens that at the time and added that 'all those who want to give away Tivat's land at the airport to Podgorica are half-wit'. Where are the people who said that in 2020 today? In the Tender Commission for Concession of the Airport," said Petković.
Mayor Komnenović said that the local government and municipality do not decide what will happen to the airports, but rather the state does so through the Government and the Parliament, "because the airport, whether anyone likes it or not, is state property."
"The Tender Commission did what it was supposed to do - it ranked the submitted bids and nothing more. Further decisions are made by the Parliament of Montenegro, not us. I am proud that by working in the Tender Commission, we prevented a major fraud, which was to the detriment of Montenegro and Tivat, but then again," he emphasized, adding that for years Tivat Airport was a party cell and a reservoir of votes through party recruitment for the SDP and SD and that at that time it was devastated to the extent that it needed urgent reconstruction and modernization of its capacities. He emphasized that the airport must be developed and that the expropriation of private property of citizens around the airport is already underway and that the Government has paid 12 million euros to the residents of Tivat for this.
"You just quoted the words of Prime Minister Milojko Spajić, why according to him the airport must go into concession," Petković replied.
Nikola Došljak (DPS) assessed that Komnenović's report is "a marketing report in which the government praises itself" and that its extensiveness and "administrative listing of information attempts to cover up the essence of the fact that key problems of citizens have not been solved for years, such as the traffic collapse we have in Tivat."
The opposition, led by Zdravko Mitrović (SD) and Ćazim Lisičić (SDP), has repeatedly raised the issue of alleged fraud and the poorly implemented project for a new balloon hall in the city park, which, as they pointed out, "cost the city 300 thousand euros, as stated in one part of the mayor's report, or 374.000 euros as stated elsewhere in the same report."
"The balloon hall has turned into a scandal. The report does not contain an analysis of responsibility for what happened. The issue of lack of transparency is particularly concerning because the documentation is being hidden from councilors and the public," Mitrović claimed, which was denied by the director of the municipal Investment Directorate, Vlado Brguljan.
However, the efforts of the opposition from the European Union to impose the topic of balloon halls as one of the, allegedly, most harmful to local government, fell through with the speech of the councilor of the opposition DPS, Renate Bergam Grandis, who reprimanded her colleagues for "talking about the balloon hall for two hours as if millions had been spent on it" and publicly supported Brguljan.
"Of all the balloons in our environment, the balloons in Tivat are the ones that are important for such a big story," said Bergam-Grandis, who was also bothered by the several-hour-long debate on the mayor's report, to the point that she warned the president of the municipal council, Miljan Marković (Nova), that "we (council members - ed. author's note) are not cattle that someone should keep us here for hours and bore us."
This angered her coalition partner from the Liberal Party, Vatroslav Belan, who said that "parliament is there to talk, and anyone who finds it boring and tiring to listen to it should not run on the election lists."
"We will push the bubble in accordance with our political agenda," Belan emphasized.
Ćazim Lisičić raised the topic of last year's incident with the deletion of part of the municipal database and the compromise of its information system as a particularly serious one, which the police and prosecutor's office, based on the Municipality's criminal complaint against unidentified perpetrators, are still investigating.
He said that "400 days of data have disappeared" from the municipal IT system and that backups have also been deleted, which, as he said, is "sabotage and crime", and he asked for the names of those responsible to be announced.
"Was this 'digital darkness' a cover for covering up some financial malfeasance?", asked Lisičić, to which he received an answer from the IT sector officials, the Secretariat for Local Government and Mayor Komnenović that at the beginning of this year the Municipality managed to restore the complete files that were temporarily lost in last year's incident and that it had subsequently significantly strengthened its IT infrastructure and its security, and that the police and the prosecutor's office were investigating the perpetrators of this incident. After additional calls by Lisičić for the purchase of a new official car for the Secretariat for Finance and the statement that the Municipality "is not a rental administration that gives its vehicles to the Ministry of the Interior for use and then buys new ones for itself", Komnenović told the SDP councilor that "Lisičić's observations are simply phenomenal and that, instead of politics, he should be doing stand-up comedy".
After Lisičić called out Vlado Brguljan, the director of the Directorate for Investments, in a controversy over the construction of a balloon hall and other local government tenders, which did not receive bids from contractors, that "the tenders may be failing because they failed to install them," the latter announced that he would immediately file a police report against Lisičić due to such accusations, which he subsequently did.
"By acting like this, you give me the right to report you now for possible financial fraud with municipal projects," the SDP councilor replied.
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