In Ungheni we have reached such a level of administrative refinement that things are no longer simply “yes” or “no”.
They are “yes, but”.
“No, however”.
“Coming up”.
“In progress”.
“It was discussed”.
“It will be”.
And, my favourite, the supreme form of existence of the Moldovan project: “it is envisaged”.
For the citizen, the simple part remains: to find out which of the variants they are living in today.
This week I wanted to pick a subject for the editorial. There was no need. Local reality laid three on my desk, and then I realised they are the same subject.
Delia.
The multimodal station.
The Slavena bus terminal.
One has water, another trains, another buses. No connection, you’d say.
There is.
In all three, the ordinary person risks arriving at the same question:
Fine. But concretely — what the hell is going on?
The beach where everything is fine, except that big wet thing in the middle
Let’s start with Lake Delia.
We have a municipal beach.
The beach is open.
We have lifeguards.
People come.
Up to this point, a citizen with no special training in administrative procedure might make the mad assumption that at an open beach you can swim.
Not so fast.
The area has no sanitary authorisation. In 2026 it had not been included in the monitoring calendar. After the fish die-off in early August, the City Hall requested a water sample.
The result communicated by the Public Health Centre: class V by chemical parameters. The lowest class.
And it is not a statistical accident.
Class V in 2024.
Class V in 2025.
Class V in 2026.
The Public Health Centre says the water is unfit for bathing.
The beach stays open, with lifeguards.
I appreciate the consistency.
The water, at least, knows what it wants from life.
Three years running: class V. No fluctuations. No populism. No electoral promises that next year it will move up to class IV.
The only undecided element in the equation seems to be what we mean by the word “beach”.
For the ordinary person, “open municipal beach” conveys a relatively banal message: you come, you lie in the sun, you go in the water.
With us, the full message seems to be:
“Come without worry. The lifeguards are here. In the water, though, the Public Health Centre says you shouldn’t go in.”
I have nothing against the lifeguards. On the contrary. If people go in, it is very good that someone is there who can pull them out.
It’s just that the situation takes on a faint flavour of an open restaurant in which the sanitary authority says the food is not fit for consumption, but the waiters are at their posts.
Perhaps only the sign is missing:
DELIA MUNICIPAL BEACH
Hours: open.
Lifeguards: yes.
Bathing: better not.
The water: participates at its own risk.
And here we are no longer talking about a legal subtlety. We are talking about the message a person receives when they see, physically, an open public beach.
The institutions know the file. The citizen sees the deckchair.
That’s a difference.
The multimodal station, that splendid means of transport into the future
On Monday, Infrastructure Minister Vladimir Bolea announced in Ungheni that the road and rail station would be handed over to the City Hall and turned into a multimodal station.
Sounds good.
I really do think it would be good for the town.
Mayor Vitalie Vrabie spoke of rapid investments.
And then I did what journalists do when they spoil the atmosphere of a fine statement: I started looking for the documents.
In the public registers checked by Triunghi.md, I did not find a decision on the transfer. No financing was indicated. No concrete deadline was indicated. And the official press release about the minister’s visit that same day did not even mention the station.
This does not mean the station will not be transferred.
Maybe it will.
I hope it will.
It only means that there is a difference, small and irritating, between “we will do” and “it’s done”.
In the Republic of Moldova, this difference sometimes suffers discrimination.
“It will be transferred.”
“It is being transferred.”
“The City Hall will take it over.”
“We have a multimodal station.”
Four sentences. Four different administrative realities.
In political communication, however, if you utter them fast enough, they become almost one.
We must nevertheless admit that the multimodal station, in its current form of public intention, has some extraordinary advantages.
It cannot run late.
It cannot exceed the budget.
It cannot have problems at tender.
It cannot have construction defects.
The roof doesn’t leak.
The toilet doesn’t freeze.
No contractor gets upset.
It is perfect.
The future is probably the best builder Moldova has ever had.
It delivers flawlessly — until the day it becomes present.
After that, the handover reports begin.
I’m not asking anyone not to announce plans. It is normal for a minister and a mayor to say what they intend to do.
I only ask that we keep sentences in their verb tenses.
The future in the future.
The present in the present.
The document after the document exists.
It seems a small demand, but civilisation was, in general, built from such fussy things.
Slavena, or the moment when for a bus you start needing a university degree
With the Slavena bus terminal we already enter a zone where the joke must be made with the documents on the table.
ANTA issued acts on the Transport Programme in which routes linked to “Ungheni GA Slavena” appear.
In parallel, the Ungheni Municipal Council suspended and then repealed its own agreement on the arrangement at Decebal 19/B, citing among other things the commercial designation of the land and safety issues.
This does not mean that ANTA’s orders prove, on their own, the legality of the entire bus-terminal activity.
They do not.
Nor do the Municipal Council’s acts give us the right to automatically invent the opposite conclusion.
They are different authorities, with different competences and acts that produce different effects.
From the point of view of administrative law — very interesting.
From the point of view of a person with a bag in hand:
where’s the bus?
Here two worlds meet.
In the first there are material competences, the legal regime of the land, the Transport Programme, administrative acts, notifications, orders, Council decisions and delimitations of powers.
In the other there is auntie Maria, who needs to get home.
Auntie Maria is not obliged to know which act produces which effect.
She shouldn’t need a folder of PDFs to reach the bus.
She shouldn’t have to defend, at the bus stop, a master’s thesis:
“The interference of local public administration competences with the regulation of regular road passenger transport services: a case study, Decebal 19/B.”
The bus is leaving.
She wants to be on it.
Administrative civilisation begins exactly where a person no longer has to understand the organisational chart of the state in order to use a service.
We sometimes offer the premium version.
You open ANTA’s order.
You open the Council’s decision.
You check the dates.
You see which institution is responsible for what.
You look for another regulation.
You send another request.
You make yourself a coffee.
Another PDF appears.
In the end you have every chance of understanding the situation.
The bus, meanwhile, has left.
The cat
Almost a century ago, Schrödinger imagined the famous story of the cat in the box, which, by the logic of the experiment, is in two states at once until you open the box and check.
It was a thought experiment.
Ungheni seems to have seen administrative potential here.
We have Schrödinger’s beach: open, but the water declared unfit for bathing.
We have Schrödinger’s station: transferred in the future of the statement, but with no public transfer act identified at the time of checking.
And we have Schrödinger’s transport file: acts issued by different authorities, from different competences, which the citizen has to put together themselves to see the picture.
The problem is that the citizen does not live in a quantum-physics seminar.
They have to take their child somewhere.
They have to get to work.
They have to catch the bus.
Maybe they want to go for a swim.
In the experiment there was an imaginary cat in a box.
With us it’s the person.
And the box is on a lunch break.
The real paradox: Ungheni really is moving
I could end here with the traditional “nothing gets done, everyone’s bad”, gather a bit more applause and go home satisfied.
Only it would be false.
Ungheni really is developing.
The municipality issued bonds worth 10 million lei for street repairs.
It leads the European project UCare, worth 1.47 million euros, for green infrastructure and climate adaptation.
The bridge over the Prut had reached roughly 55%, and on the Moldovan bank the deck installation had begun.
The access roads to the new agri-food market are being built.
On Decebal, the traders bought the paving for a public car park, and the City Hall covered the labour and the other materials.
So we’re not talking about a dead town.
That’s precisely where the interesting part is.
Ungheni seems to modernise physically faster than the way the administration explains reality to the citizen modernises.
We’ve reached green infrastructure.
Municipal bonds.
European projects worth millions.
An international bridge.
“Multimodal”.
We are no longer the administration with a register tied up with string.
But when a person asks:
“And now, concretely, how do things stand?”
sometimes the string reappears.
Only now it’s a PDF.
The state produces something else that cannot be inaugurated
When we say administration, we think of asphalt, sewerage, documents, parks, light bulbs, certificates.
Visible things.
Things next to which you can put a sign.
Things you can photograph.
But there is another public product you cannot inaugurate with a ribbon.
Certainty.
The citizen must know what is valid today.
Not what is wished for.
Not what is being discussed.
Not what is “coming up”.
Today.
Can they go in the water or not?
Has the transfer been decided or is it intended?
Who is responsible?
Which act exists?
Where does one go?
This does not demand perfection.
Sometimes the correct answer can be:
“We don’t know yet.”
That’s a good answer.
“The procedure is not finished.”
Good.
“It is not within our competence.”
Good.
“The act does not yet exist.”
Perfect.
I will any day prefer a clear “not yet” to a murky “yes, that is, not quite, but in principle yes, only procedurally it’s coming up”.
“No” has an underrated quality.
You understand it.
Administrative fog is more comfortable for the institution, but the cognitive bill goes to the citizen.
And the person pays it in time.
In nerves.
In phone calls.
In trips.
In questions.
We digitised the state. The person remained the adapter
This is what amuses me most.
We’ve been talking for years about digitalisation.
We have registers.
Portals.
Electronic signature.
Interoperability.
Platforms.
Digital services.
Dashboards.
The whole shebang.
Then a real problem appears and we discover that institution A has one piece, institution B another, institution C explains something else, the press release simplifies, the act does not simplify at all, and the person opens five tabs in the browser and starts making the connections themselves.
True interoperability.
Manual.
At home.
The citizen is the adapter between institutions.
The digital state transmits through the person.
If the person doesn’t understand the first time, they probably have the old firmware version.
Read another order.
Download another PDF.
Call somewhere.
Restart.
Now it works.
And after they finish debugging the administration, they can calmly return to work to produce the taxes from which we fund the next digitalisation project.
A very nice economic circuit.
KPI zero
Perhaps, before kilometres of asphalt, millions attracted, projects submitted, meetings held and press releases published, there should be a more banal indicator.
A KPI zero.
After the interaction with the institution, does the citizen understand the situation better than before?
Yes?
Well done.
No?
Then something isn’t working.
And if a person needs the press to find out what the press release of the institution — which exists precisely to communicate something to them — means, we have created a remarkable construction:
a public service with technical support outsourced to a journalist.
The problem isn’t even that the institution doesn’t know.
Often it knows very well.
The problem arises when the institution considers it has done its job because the people inside the institution understand what they meant.
The citizen doesn’t take part in the internal meeting.
Doesn’t see the folder.
Doesn’t know the history.
Doesn’t receive the explanatory note in their sleep.
They see the open beach.
They hear the minister.
They go to the bus.
That’s their interface with the state.
And a good interface has a simple rule: you don’t have to read the technical documentation to find out what the button does.
Ungheni has a bridge.
It has European projects.
It has bonds.
It has green infrastructure.
It may also have a multimodal station.
All of this is good.
One more thing remains to be built.
It doesn’t cost 1.47 million euros.
It doesn’t require asphalt.
It doesn’t even have to be tendered.
An administrative reality that a person can understand without opening all the PDFs.
Until then, welcome to Schrödinger’s Ungheni.
Everything is clear.
You just have to open the box.
And the annexes.
The illustration accompanying this editorial (on listing pages and when shared on social media) is generated with artificial intelligence.