The Agency for Geodesy, Cartography and Cadastre (AGCC) has included the Ungheni district in a national project through which the state is putting its own assets in order. Between 16 and 26 June, the agency’s leadership and the specialists of the Cadastre of Immovable Property carried out working visits to Chișinău and to 20 districts, Ungheni among them, for a programme that will delimit and register public property in 275 localities across the country, by 2028. To a resident of Ungheni, this sounds like distant bureaucracy. In reality, it is exactly the paperwork without which a town hall can do little with a plot of land or a building of its own.
What the project actually involves
«Delimiting public property» means two concrete things: identifying and registering in the cadastre the assets — land and buildings — that belong to the state or to local authorities, and correcting the errors that have crept into cadastral records over time. The beneficiaries are local public authorities, of the first and second levels, as well as the central institutions that manage state assets.
According to the explanatory note of the draft government decision, the works cover, nationally, about 206 thousand public real-estate assets left outside the record, cost around 96 million lei and span three years, 2026–2028. Technically, the project does not start a new programme but extends the existing delimitation programme from 2019 to 2028, on the basis of the Cadastre Law and the Law on the delimitation of public property. The implementers are AGCC and the public institution «Cadastre of Immovable Property».
«275 town halls» or «275 localities»?
It is worth slowing down here, because the difference is not one of nuance. The official statement reposted on social networks speaks of «275 town halls». The government document underlying the project, however, says otherwise: «275 localities» that had not been included in the previous land-registration programme. And the list by district is explicit — from the Ungheni district, 16 localities are covered.
Now, the Ungheni district has 33 town halls spread across 74 localities. The 16 are, therefore, a part of the district’s villages and towns, not 16 of the 33 administrations. How many distinct town halls these 16 localities comprise does not follow from the document, and their nominal list is not, for now, public. It is a clarification that matters: «all the town halls» and «a part of the localities» do not say the same thing about how large the problem really is.
Why it matters to a mayor
The stake is best seen in a concrete case, which happened this very month in the district. On 23 June, the Ungheni District Council was able to put the Bușila building complex up for auction precisely because the property was already delimited and registered — it had cadastral numbers. Without that status, the transaction would not even have been possible.
This is the logic of the whole project, turned inside out: a plot or a public building without a clean cadastral number is, on paper, hard to tax, to pledge, to sell or to develop legally. The explanatory note says it directly — delimitation reduces property disputes, helps tax real estate correctly and raises the value of the assets an authority manages. For Ungheni’s 16 localities, the project targets exactly the assets left outside the register.
Who pays
The roughly 96 million lei come from the state budget, planned within the Growth Plan for the Republic of Moldova — the financing agreement of about 1.9 billion euros from the European Union, with reforms and measures across seven directions, including the national coverage of the cadastre. It is a distinction worth drawing correctly: the money for the cadastral works is the state’s own budget resources, planned in the logic of this plan, not a direct European cheque for the cadastre.
For the Ungheni district, the June visit of the cadastre is the beginning, not the end: only when the 16 localities have their public assets measured and entered in the register will it be possible to say that the project has done its job on the ground. How many of the district’s town halls are touched, and which exactly are the 16 localities, remain to be learned from the official list, which the newsroom will request.
The data on the project — the 275 localities, the figure of about 96 million lei, the 2026–2028 period, the volume of about 206 thousand assets and the «Ungheni – 16» breakdown — come from the explanatory note of the draft government decision drawn up by the Agency for Geodesy, Cartography and Cadastre (NU-955-AGCC-2025). The working visits of 16–26 June, including to the Ungheni district, and the wording «275 town halls» come from the AGCC statement; the government document uses the term «localities», which is why Triunghi.md drew the distinction. The administrative structure of the district (33 town halls, 74 localities) and the Bușila auction case come from public records and, respectively, from an own article. The nominal list of the Ungheni district’s 16 localities was not public at the time of writing; Triunghi.md had not, by the time of publication, obtained a reaction from AGCC or from the district’s local authorities.