Meeting of students with the Chairman of the Committee on Finance and Budget Planning of the Lviv City Council Shelestak Natalia Volodymyrivna

As part of the curriculum for the discipline “Local Finance” on April 2, 2021 by teachers of the Department of Financial Management Prof. Vatamanyuk-Zelinska UZ and Assoc. Kozakevich OR, an online meeting of 4th year students with the Chairman of the Standing Committee on Finance and Budget Planning of the Lviv City Council Shelestak Natalia Volodymyrivna was held.

The purpose of the meeting was to discuss issues related to the formation of the development budget of the Lviv city territorial community, setting funding priorities and the application of the budget savings regime in a pandemic.

Natalia Volodymyrivna spoke about the peculiarities of the formation of the revenue side of the budget, the structure of expenditures, the dynamics of public budget financing, the need to develop a debt strategy, and stressed the feasibility of conducting a quality audit of Lviv utilities. According to Ms. Natalia, a significant part of the city’s development budget is used to pay off debts and expenditures on unprofitable utilities. Instead, hundreds of important projects (for example in medicine and education) remain underfunded. In addition, during the meeting, students had the opportunity to ask Natalia Vladimirovna questions and get comprehensive answers about the advantages and disadvantages of enlarging Lviv through the formation of the city territorial community.

Despite the remoteness of the meeting, the discussion of the problems of the development budget of Lviv seemed lively and interesting. According to students, the value of this format of meetings lies in the possibility of casual communication with an expert-practitioner of such a high level, which gave the opportunity to gain knowledge “first hand” and form a comprehensive understanding of both theoretical and analytical material in “Local Finance”.

We express our sincere gratitude to the Chairman of the Standing Committee on Finance and Budget Planning of the Lviv City Council Ms. Natalia Volodymyrivna Shelestak for openness and opportunity for professional discussion with students and teachers of the Department of Financial Management of Ivan Franko National University of Lviv and hope for our fruitful cooperation in the future.