On 31 August, two communal councils in Ungheni district met and voted for the same merger: Petrești and Todirești are joining into a single town hall, with its centre at Petrești. It was the last day of the month up to which the government had announced, in a release of 31 July, that the remaining town halls could still complete their files without losing voluntary-amalgamation status and the package of incentives. With those two decisions, 33 town halls in the district will become eight.
Both acts were published in the State Register of Local Acts on the day they were adopted. The Petrești council met in extraordinary session and decided, at point 1: «The voluntary amalgamation of the administrative-territorial units, the commune of Petrești, Ungheni district, and the commune of Todirești, Ungheni district, is approved». The Todirești council voted an act with the same operative wording, at point 4, and in the same document also requested a transfer of 400,000 lei to prepare the process — money to be claimed by the Petrești town hall, on behalf of both communes.
Petrești becomes the administrative centre because, both decisions write, it «obtained the highest score» of the two, under the criteria of Law no. 225/2023 and of the methodology approved by Government Decision no. 925/2023. The mayor of Petrești, Serghei Gorea, is to collect both councils’ decisions and send the consolidated file to the State Chancellery; the mayor of Todirești, Victor Baltag, is to hand him his commune’s acts. Each decision may be contested within 30 days at the Ungheni Court.
The Petrești council rewrote its own decision
The date of approval is not the one that first appeared in the register. On 26 August, decision no. 05/2 of the Petrești Communal Council was published, adopted the day before. Its title announced the «initiation of the voluntary amalgamation process of the communes of Petrești and Todirești», but the operative part published at the time said something else: «The voluntary amalgamation is approved».
Six days later, the decision of 31 August retroactively changed that text. Point 3 of the new decision rewrites points 1 and 2 of the old one, which become «The proposal to initiate the process is accepted» and «The voluntary amalgamation process is initiated», and rewrites the enacting formula in full. The approval itself now sits in the new act.
The consequence is that the date on which the Petrești Communal Council approved the merger is 31 August, not 25 August, as the act showed in its originally published form — including in our own report of 28 August, written from the register’s text as it then stood.
Todirești asked three times, with three different partners
Todirești asked for the merger three times, until one of its prospective partners said yes. From May to August, the Todirești council adopted three decisions initiating an amalgamation, each with a different composition.
On 15 May, the first: amalgamation «with the village of Chirileni, the village of Bușila and the commune of Negurenii Vechi». On 5 June, the second: «with the commune of Pîrlița, the commune of Agronomovca, the village of Teșcureni, the commune of Alexeevca and the village of Rădenii Vechi». On 6 August, the third: «with the commune of Petrești, Ungheni district».
The first two groups formed without Todirești. Chirileni, Negurenii Vechi and Bușila adopted their approval decisions on 29 and 30 July, as a group of three; Pîrlița, Agronomovca, Alexeevca, Teșcureni and Rădenii Vechi — between 23 and 27 July, as a group of five. According to the stocktaking published on 31 July by the district president, Dionisie Ternovschi, Todirești was at that point the only town hall in the district left «without a reciprocal voluntary amalgamation decision».
The third request was accepted. The Petrești council — the same one that had rejected the initiation in May, after a general assembly of the commune — started the process on 25 August and closed it on the 31st.
What «the whole district» means, exactly
The phrase «the whole district» needs a qualifier, because it does not mean the same thing in two different sets.
If the set is «town halls whose situation is settled», then there are all 33. If the set is «town halls merging with someone», then there are 32. The commune of Măcărești has no amalgamation decision in the State Register of Local Acts — neither of initiation nor of approval. A search by issuer, with three different terms, returns zero results; the register’s search engine indexes the titles of acts, not their text. Since an act of a local authority enters into force on the date it is included in the register, an amalgamation decision by Măcărești ought to have appeared there.
This does not place it outside the law, or off the map. Law no. 225/2023 governs a voluntary amalgamation, and staying within present boundaries is an option the law leaves open. In his 31 July stocktaking, the district president counts Măcărești as the seventh of the eight future town halls.
The commune did come close to a merger. On 16 June, the draft decision on amalgamation with the municipality of Ungheni failed to gather the necessary votes in the communal council, although an assembly of citizens had approved it a few days earlier — according to the Măcărești town hall’s announcement at the time. Seven councillors requested an extraordinary session, which the mayor convened for 22 June by Disposition no. 31. The register contains no amalgamation decision by the commune after that date either.
The eight town halls, measured today
The composition of the eight future town halls is the one set out in the published decisions. The population below is the figure the National Bureau of Statistics gives for each commune at 1 January 2026, added up by group; the 2026 series is flagged by the Bureau as provisional data.
| Future town hall | Units | Inhabitants (1 Jan 2026) |
|---|---|---|
| Măcărești | 1 | 3,106 |
| Bușila | 3 | 3,317 |
| Cornești | 3 | 4,064 |
| Boghenii Noi | 7 | 4,812 |
| Petrești | 2 | 5,909 |
| Sculeni | 3 (+1) | 6,080 |
| Pîrlița | 5 | 6,583 |
| Ungheni municipality | 9 (+1) | 40,100 |
Two groups cross the district boundary and each have one further unit, not counted in the column: the Sculeni group also takes in the commune of Taxobeni, Fălești district, and the municipal group the commune of Brătuleni, Nisporeni district. The sum of the district’s 33 units is 73,971 inhabitants — exactly the total the Bureau publishes for Ungheni district.
The largest group is that of Ungheni municipality, with 40,100 inhabitants from within the district, more than half the district’s population. The smallest is Măcărești, the only one of the 33 whose boundaries stay as they are.
The figure in the acts is two years old
Not every decision writes a population figure, and those that do attribute it to «official data supplied by the National Bureau of Statistics», without saying which year it refers to. Five of the eight groups have a figure that can be checked directly against the Bureau’s table — and all five match exactly the population at 1 January 2024: 5,947 for Petrești and Todirești, 3,566 for the Bușila group, 4,172 for Cornești, 4,978 for Boghenii Noi, 6,882 for Pîrlița.
At 1 January 2026, those same five groups have 5,909, 3,317, 4,064, 4,812 and 6,583 inhabitants — 860 fewer in total than the figures written into the acts. The other three groups do not enter this comparison. The Sculeni group’s decision writes 7,430 inhabitants, but counts in the commune of Taxobeni, Fălești district; the composition of the Ungheni municipality group likewise crosses the district boundary, taking in the commune of Brătuleni, Nisporeni district — and the Bureau’s table we use covers only units within Ungheni district. And Măcărești has no act in which it is counted at all.
The difference does not push any group below the threshold of 3,000 inhabitants that the decisions cite from Law no. 225/2023 — neither with the 2024 figures nor with those of 2026. What effect it has on the score by which each group’s administrative centre was chosen does not follow from the published decisions.
Seen across the district, the decline is larger than the sum of the five groups: between 1 January 2024 and 1 January 2026, the population of Ungheni district fell from 76,237 to 73,971 inhabitants — 2,266 fewer.
What comes next
The groups’ consolidated files go to the State Chancellery. As of 3 September the Chancellery has not said publicly how many of the files from Ungheni district were received on time, and the government has not announced when the act formalising the new map will be approved.
Until then, today’s 33 town halls remain in office and administer 73,971 inhabitants — the same people that, once the new map is approved, eight of them will administer.