The Mayor's Office has once again announced the community budget, which previously caused countless scandals, while a good part of the ideas of the previous winning call were still not implemented. The Office of the Mayor once again allocates one billion forints to the community budget, despite the fact that the capital is currently operating with overdrafts.

The planning of the community budget will continue this year based on the city development ideas of the people of Budapest: until October 7, you can vote on what the Budapest Municipality should implement from among the suggestions of the people of Budapest, the Office of the Mayor told MTI on Thursday.

Anyone living, working, studying or over the age of 14 in Budapest can vote. Voting does not require a registered address in Budapest. Votes can be cast until October 7, on the otlet.budapest.hu website, in person at designated member libraries of the Ervin Szabó Library of the Capital City, at the general customer service of the Office of the Mayor during opening hours, and in out-of-town locations during the last three weekends of voting.

In the poll, you can vote for ideas submitted at the end of last year. The list of 175 ideas was created from the almost seven hundred received ideas after a professional pre-screening, from which the citizens of the capital can choose. In the community budget, the municipality implements the most popular of the ideas submitted by residents from a HUF one billion budget, for the fourth time this year. In recent years, the capital has implemented 17 ideas.

In recent years, the community budgets organized by the capital have been far from scandal-free.

Problems or unpleasant incidents have arisen countless times in connection with the community budget, which serves as a model project for left-liberal city management. It turned out that the project was meant to fulfill the personal ambitions of Gergely Karácsony instead of the wishes of the population.

The capital led by Gergely Karácsony also tries to involve children in the decisions. According to the regulations of the community budget, at least teenagers over 14 years of age can submit ideas and vote, which is in line with the objective of the Budapest municipality, which considers it important to "promote the involvement of new generations in public affairs". All this is done despite the fact that the National Data Protection and Freedom of Information Authority found that the capital city did not act correctly when it made voting available to those under 18 years of age.

As they said: according to Hungarian civil law, a person under the age of 18 (but has reached the age of 14) has limited capacity to act, therefore the consent of the legal representative is also required for the validity of their major legal declarations. Therefore, the Karácsony should have acted in such a way that, when seeking the opinions of minors, they primarily used the legal institution of the direct contact procedure provided by law.

In order to request the personal data of minors, the prior consent of the legal representative should have been obtained. According to the office of data protection commissioner Attila Péterfalvi, the questionnaire in the capital was nothing more than political marketing.

The zebra was handed over

However, this was not the only act of concern regarding the Community budget. At the beginning of December, Gergely Karácsony personally handed over a zebra that had been planned for almost ten years. In connection with the handover, an iconic photo was also taken, in which the mayor of Budapest once again showed that his knowledge of traffic is extremely incomplete, for the sake of the photo he was even willing to walk through Rákóczi út, which he calls the downtown highway, in red.

Regarding the case, Zsolt Wintermantel said earlier that the zebra was designed by BKK during the time of István Tarlós, and would have been part of the renovation of Blaha Lujza tér.

Only the politically important projects were implemented by the capital

It also became obvious that the voted ideas will not be realized if they do not fit into the narrative imagined by the city administration. Mayor Gergely Karácsony launched the fourth community budget this year despite the fact that not even a third of the ideas of the previous three winning tenders were implemented.

However, among the winning ideas of the third community budget, the capital implemented only the politically important projects, such as protected bicycle lanes. In numbers, it all looks like nine of the winning ideas so far have been completed, another twenty-four are in the process of being implemented, these have been supplemented by this year's twenty winning ideas.

The full article can be read in Magyar Nemzet

Cover photo: Gergely Karácsony's Facebook page