Avinyan: Hope It Doesn’t End Up Like the Famous Anecdote About ‘Veolia Water’ and the Church

This is the first phase of comprehensive changes, and with these changes, we are merging subdivisions with overlapping functions into a single unit. This was announced by Mayor Tigran Avinyan during the discussion of a project to approve the structure, staffing list, and number of employees of the Yerevan municipality and the heads of administrative districts at a session of the Yerevan City Council today.

“We can say, for example, we have service X and service Y. Service X could fine a resident for some violation, and then service Y could also go and fine the same violation. We are uniting these overlapping functions as a first step. The risk here may be that this process does not continue. We need to implement comprehensive and deep structural changes,” emphasized Avinyan.

Member of the “National Progress” faction Tigran Petrosyan stated that in such cases there should be a monitoring plan for the transitional period and a risk mitigation plan. In response, Avinyan said, “From my experience, I can state one thing: subdivisions with overlapping functions are always less efficient than merging those functions into a single subdivision. This is a clear rule of management. I am not saying we should merge everything and end up like the famous anecdote about ‘Veolia Water’ and the church, but very specifically, subdivisions with similar functions should be merged step by step to obtain services in that area. For instance, we should have one service for maintaining public order in the end, hopefully next year,” he elaborated.