Mykolaiv City Hall costs one million a day to maintain

In 2025, more than UAH 351 million is allocated for the salaries of Mykolaiv city council officials. This is a daily expenditure of almost a million hryvnias just for the maintenance of the administration apparatus - not including teachers, doctors, or utilities.

According to Mikvisti, all departments, offices and district administrations of the city council cost the budget an average of 29 million hryvnias per month, and 963 thousand per day. This is 40 thousand per hour, 669 hryvnias per minute, and 11 hryvnias per second - exclusively for the salaries of officials.

The largest sums are allocated to the executive committee of the city council (UAH 96.8 million), the department of labor and social protection (UAH 53.7 million), the department of administrative services (UAH 31 million), and the department of housing and communal services (UAH 25.8 million). For comparison, in 2022, the total payroll was lower - UAH 288.9 million, despite the fact that the city still received military personal income tax. Now, having lost this tax, which is about UAH 2.7 billion, Mykolaiv has increased the payroll for the city hall.

The international audit company Ernst & Young, involved in the project of reforming Mykolaiv's governance, analyzed the structure of executive bodies and concluded that the mayor's office has an excessive number of employees and managers.

The staffing level is 1115 employees, while about 948 people actually work there. Of these, 374 are managers. That is, every third employee has a managerial position, and the ratio of subordinates to managers is 2 to 1. The auditors pointed to an abnormally large number of staff compared to other Ukrainian cities and international standards.

And the MPs elected from Mykolaiv region submitted regular declarations of real estate, land, and business assets. Most of them have no significant changes, but some have sold some property or, conversely, acquired new assets. The main source of wealth is business, dividends, and income from relatives' businesses. All declarants are representatives of the Servant of the People party.

The Center for Public Investigations also analyzed the reports of the mayors of four district centers in the region: Mykolaiv, Pervomaisk, Voznesensk, and Bashtanka. Some of them have millions in cash, while others have hectares of land, cryptocurrency, or fleets of vintage cars and luxury foreign cars.

Анна Бальчінос