The councils of Petrești and Todirești approved their merger on 31 August, the last day the government had announced for voluntary files. Of the district's 33 town halls, 32 now have a merger decision published in the state register.
The Petrești Local Council voted for voluntary amalgamation with Todirești at the end of August: initiation on 25 August, approval on 31 August, the last day before the legal ban. In May it had rejected the same proposal, when approximately 300 citizens had also voted against. The Todirești consultation meeting was called for 6 September.
A workshop organized by the Culture and Tourism Department at Petrești, on 23 July, raised a problem larger than a single day of sessions: the peasant houses of clay, wood and reed thatch in the district's villages are being lost, against a backdrop of depopulation of more than 22% in a decade, and the ordinary ones hold no monument status. What most often remains is only what someone manages to document — a method with deep roots right here, at Cornova, where Dimitrie Gusti's team was already “reading” the village back in 1931.
Since late June, residents of Petrești commune (Ungheni district) have complained of going days on end with no water at the tap, especially in the “hill area”, and on 5 July they launched a petition to the mayor's office and the Local Council: they want an inquiry, a public schedule of the cut-offs and, if wrongdoing is found, the dismissal of the official in charge of water distribution. Mayor Serghei Gorea had already replied publicly on 27 June that the problem is being taken seriously — the commune dug a new well, for which the Council allocated 90,000 lei — and points to the drought and the heatwave. Petrești, one of the district's largest villages by number of houses connected to the mains (1,052), depends on its own municipal enterprise, Servicom-Petrești, not on Apă-Canal Ungheni.
