November 27, 2023 – The Mayor of Zagreb Tomislav Tomašević was a guest of Dnevnik N1 television where he spoke about the upcoming elections and current events in the city of Zagreb, as well as plans for the coming year, touching on the Zagreb traffic issue.
“I don’t rate myself, that will come at the end of my term. Not all problems can be solved in the first two years. In the second half of the mandate, most of this will be realized and completed. This week we had the biggest credit rating increase in the last two and a half years. That’s impressive, and that’s why we’re able to make all these capital investments. We will open 4 kindergartens by the end of this year, and 10 more in the next year. We need money from the parent-educator measure to invest in the construction of kindergartens and hire additional staff. This year alone, we employed an additional 450 people in the city’s kindergartens. We want all children in this city to have universal access to kindergartens by the end of our mandate,” said Zagreb Mayor Tomislav Tomašević, as reported by Poslovni.
Tomašević states that Zagreb has a budget for next year, a 6-fold increase in credit rating, a budget that is at the 4th level, and one of the most transparent budgets in Croatia.
“We do all this in cooperation with the head of the finance office. It is completely irrelevant who the head is and whether the head is acting or not. We reduced the number of offices because we reduced the number of management staff. The number decreased by about 200 people, but it is necessary to hire new people. We keep all our promises. The city of Zagreb had more ministries than the government. We said we would reduce it and we did. This year, we will withdraw 5 times more money from EU funds, about 150 million more than in 2019. When the roundabout was opened, the city of Zagreb received 30 million euros,” he said, adding: “Next year we will have automatic traffic management where we will have 100 intersections with automatic control of traffic lights. This will significantly increase the flow rate at these intersections. The project includes a quarter of the intersection in the city of Zagreb and it will cost around 10 million euros. As for Zagreb traffic, next year we will also build two tram lines, in Heinzelova Street and Sarajevska Street. For twenty years, not a single meter of tram line was built. We bought buses and trams with EU funds and will buy more. We are also going to extend Branimirova in order to get rid of the congestion in Sesvete,” he said.
Tomašević also touched on the issue of Jakuševac.
“Jakuševec is one of the key problems of the city of Zagreb. As soon as I realized that we will not be able to do that in this mandate, I stated why. The rules changed after the election. Our priority is to close the compost plant in Jakuševac. The City of Zagreb cannot do it alone without the Government. There is no way we can join forces with HDZ. I think that we will do best in Zagreb and that we will achieve a much better result than in the last elections. As for point coalitions, we will see if it will be achieved in some constituencies”, he concluded.
