Bečarević: Why parties are scrambling for utility companies

By Almir Bečarević, gas and energy expert and former minister in the KS Government

When talking about cantonal public utility companies in the Sarajevo Canton and the work of these companies, dissatisfaction is noticeable among the vast majority of the canton's residents. Dissatisfaction with water supply, garbage collection, park maintenance, and poor street cleaning are the most common complaints that can be heard. There are various theories as to why this is the case, but I would define it as a legacy of some distant times when companies were significantly subsidized and which, along party lines, had to function in a way that served the party's order.

Those times have passed, and the companies have not restructured for the arrival of new times, so they still have the right to subsidies today, but without the order that existed when there was only one party. Multi-party politics has also entered all pores of company management here, but the most important thing, subsidies, has remained. How this looks today in terms of subsidies will be presented by the following data:

For the period from 2020 to 2024, 100,119,000 KM was allocated from the KS budget for subsidies to public companies. Specifically, over 100 million KM was allocated for subsidizing public utility consumption over 4 years. In addition to this, subsidized companies also collect fees for their services, so this is not their only source of financing.

At the same time, some companies have their loans or VAT obligations arising from their liabilities paid. When everything is combined, the amount of 100 million KM is not the final amount, and it ranges from 120 million KM to 130 million KM for these four years.

To this amount of 120 million KM, we can add what these companies generate either through their service fees or what they have as a price difference (excluding the price of energy, e.g., gas in Sarajevogas), thus obtaining an approximate final amount of 650 million KM that these companies "turn over" based on their operations in the observed 4 years.

I think it is clear why, in a multi-party system, everyone is scrambling to "manage" these companies and what happens to what accompanied the subsidies from the one-party system, which is work (it disappears).