After the “school of governors” there will be a “school of mayors”

On April 20, at a meeting of the Presidential Council for the Development of Local Self-Government (LSG), the creation of a “school of mayors” will be announced, similar to the “school of governors” at the RANEPA. This was reported to Vedomosti by two interlocutors close to the presidential administration. The meeting of the council will be held, as Vedomosti previously wrote, by President Vladimir Putin.

The “school of mayors” will train managers who can potentially lead large municipalities, one of the interlocutors says. “This should compensate for the lack of qualified personnel in local self-government, which is periodically discussed,” the interlocutor notes. Another Vedomosti source says that the training will take place at the RANEPA. It is also possible to train local managers in the Senezh management workshop.

A separate discussion at a council meeting may also concern those who return from a special operation. Since there is a shortage of municipal employees on the ground, the option is being considered to find a personnel reserve among the former military who are demobilized from the combat zone, the source said. These are opinion leaders who, with “proper training,” can help the system, the source said.

On the eve of the meeting, the president renewed the composition of the presidium of the council and the council itself. It included and O. Rector of the RANEPA, CEO of the platform “Russia – a Land of Opportunities” Alexei Komissarov, Minister of Agriculture Dmitry Patrushev, presidential envoy to the Central Federal District Igor Shchegolev and envoy to the Urals Federal District Vladimir Yakushev. The President increased the regional part of the council, including the acting head of the LPR Leonid Pasechnik and the acting head of the DPR Denis Pushilin.

Now the fifth stream of students is completing their studies at the “School of Governors”, the sixth stream will begin their studies in the summer. After Sergei Kiriyenko came to the post of first deputy head of the administration in 2016, he began to pay great attention to ensuring that managers and politicians were trained under the personnel reserve program. In 2017, the President instructed to launch such a management personnel reserve program at the Higher School of Public Administration of the RANEPA.

305 people became graduates of four streams. For example, over the past six years, 49 heads of regions and interim heads of regions have been trained under the personnel reserve program – it was called the “school of governors”. The last acting head of the region who was trained under this program was a native of Yamal, Prime Minister of the DPR Vitaly Khotsenko, who was appointed by the president on March 29 to the Omsk region. Also, among the graduates of the personnel management reserve program, three hold the posts of ministers in the Russian government, and 41 more people are deputy federal ministers.

The meeting of the LSG Development Council will be timed to coincide with the Day of Local Self-Government celebrated on April 21. On April 11, Vedomosti wrote that the council would discuss the problem of the lack of quality managers in the LSG system. Kiriyenko on February 14 at the marathon “Municipal Dialogue” of the All-Russian Association for the Development of Local Self-Government spoke about the need to build the training of personnel at the municipal level by analogy with the reserve training system for the regional and federal levels.

The creation of the “school of mayors” is an application of the internal political bloc of the presidential administration for more active work with personnel, along with the “school of governors” and promotion to universities, says Mikhail Vinogradov, president of the Petersburg Politics Foundation. “One can argue about the extent to which the positions of mayors have serious political significance,” the expert says. But mayors can limit the influence of governors, he notes.

Now, according to the law, there are three ways to elect the mayor: direct elections, elections by deputies of the municipal parliament from their own composition, and elections by deputies from among candidates selected during the competition. Direct elections of mayors remained in only five administrative centers – Abakan, Khabarovsk, Yakutsk, Anadyr, Ulan-Ude. Over the past year, they have been canceled in Novosibirsk and Tomsk.