COMMENTARY: Models of regional decentralisation

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By Jussi Konttinen
     
      The National Agency for Medicines is being moved from Helsinki to Kuopio, but the personnel have threatened that they will resign rather than up sticks and head north.
      The Director-General, Professor Hannes Wahlroos, has already tendered his resignation.
      Perhaps there would have been less fuss all round if a few carrots were handed out in the government’s decentralisation process.
     
Last year, the Russian Constitutional Court was transferred from the capital Moscow to St. Petersburg.
      The historic 19th-century Senate and Synod building in Decembrists' Square was refurbished to serve as the court’s new seat.
      The nineteen decentralised judges, who all agreed to the move, had new homes built for them in a gated community on the prestigious Krestovskii Island, in the most expensive part of town.
     
Each settled into a desirable and fully-equipped detached property of some 350 square metres, courtesy of the State.
      In their free time, the servants of the law can relax in 140-square metre new dachas in Terijoki, just up the coast.
      They can keep up their fitness at their own dedicated sports centre and have their ills treated at a private GP clinic.
     
How does this sound, National Agency staffers?
     
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 25.1.2009


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Minister Hyssälä calls time: National Agency for Medicines to be moved to Kuopio (20.1.2009)

See also:
  COMMENTARY: Who´d want to move to the boondocks? (20.1.2009)

Links:
  National Agency for Medicines

JUSSI KONTTINEN / Helsingin Sanomat
jussi.konttinen@hs.fi