Ungheni Mayor Vitalie Vrabie and district head Dionisie Ternovschi are attending the annual Eurocities conference this week, held from 8 to 10 June in Utrecht, the Netherlands, the city hall says in a statement posted on Facebook. It is the second of the network’s meetings the two officials have travelled to in the past three months — a membership that costs the municipal budget €7,560 a year, a sum approved publicly by the city council.
Who they met
According to the statement, the two discussed cooperation between member cities and the exchange of best practices with André Sobczak, secretary general of Eurocities, and Mathias De Clercq, mayor of the Belgian city of Ghent and president of the network. The city hall describes the talks as “productive”; no agreement, project or concrete commitment, however, was announced.
De Clercq has led Eurocities since June 2025, when he was elected president at the Braga conference for a two-year term.
Dionisie Ternovschi and Vitalie Vrabie in Utrecht. Photo: Ungheni City Hall
The 40th-anniversary conference
This year’s edition, under the banner “Sharing Horizons. Connecting People,” marks four decades since the network was founded: Eurocities was created in 1986 by six European cities and today brings together, according to figures published by the network, more than 200 cities from 38 countries, representing over 150 million people. On the Utrecht agenda: tackling poverty, climate action and city funding in the context of the EU’s next budget.
Plenary session of the Utrecht conference. Photo: taken from the Ungheni City Hall Facebook page
A member for 15 months. What has Ungheni gained?
Ungheni’s accession to Eurocities was decided by the city council in a September 2024 ruling that empowered the mayor to sign; in the network, the municipality has been listed as a member since 2025. Since then, officials have attended two meetings: the Rome forum in March 2026 and the current conference in Utrecht.
The results visible so far have to do with visibility and the exchange of best practices: Ungheni has a profile on the network’s platform, and Eurocities has showcased the municipality’s social and medical day centre as a model of integrated community care. The official statements — both the one from Rome and the current one — describe the attendance in terms of “learning opportunities” and “promoting the municipality,” without announcing any project or funding secured through the network.
The membership fee is, in fact, public: for 2026, the city council approved paying €7,560 from the local budget — about 146,000 lei (Decision no. 3/27 of 27 March 2026). To this is added the conference participation fee — €180 per person for members from non-EU countries, plus 21% VAT. What does not appear in a public act is the cost of each trip — transport, accommodation, per diems: Triunghi.md did not find, in the State Register of Local Acts, an order with these amounts.
This article is based on the Ungheni city council’s decisions on joining and on paying the membership fee (the State Register of Local Acts), on the statement from the Ungheni City Hall and on official Eurocities sources. The transport and accommodation costs of the two trips do not appear in any public act consulted by Triunghi.md.