Odesa City Council prefers landscaping to help the Armed Forces

The Odesa City Hall under Hennadii Trukhanov, despite the needs of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the terrorist defense, increased spending on landscaping every year, turning this budget item into one of the most resourceful.

The Center for Public Investigations has collected all available information on the improvement of the city to see how the funds were distributed: which departments received the most, which programs were supported by the expenditures, and how the amounts changed throughout the year. In 2025, expenditures on urban amenities have already exceeded one billion hryvnias.

City targeted programs are multi-year documents that define intentions for several years ahead. Each community determines the procedure for their development. In Odesa, this procedure until 2025 was regulated by Gennadiy Trukhanov 's Order No. 1115 of 08.11.2016, and the new procedure was approved by him in September 2025.

The main feature of a target program is its intentions. That is, the adoption of a targeted program does not automatically lead to the allocation of funds for its implementation. As stated in the current regulation in Odesa, funding is based on the real capabilities of the budget of the Odesa city territorial community. But it is budget programs that are responsible for specific funding - a tool for specific funding.

Budget programs are regulated by Article 20 of the Budget Code. Each of them is accompanied by a budget program passport, a detailed document on the areas of expenditure. The passport is prepared by the spending unit and has 45 days from the moment the budget is adopted or amended.

Even if the funds are ultimately received by a utility company or even a non-governmental organization, they still go through the key spending unit and are recorded in its passport. A separate budget and separate budget programs are created for each budget year. All budget allocations are automatically terminated after the end of the year.

The CPR has begun a detailed review of Odesa's expenditures for improvement in 2025. The first area of analysis was the expenditures of the Department of Education and Science.

Despite the fact that the latest budget program passport is not publicly available (the 45-day deadline for its publication may not have expired yet), the structure of expenditures is clearly visible through the object-based annexes of the development budget. The data shows that in 2025, the city plans to overhaul the landscaping elements of 16 kindergartens, and in five of them, such work will be financed by the deputy fund.

For 12 out of 16 kindergartens, the amount is the same - UAH 1.5 million, which corresponds to the maximum limit for simplified procurement of services. This allows us to see the general approach to the formation of the scope of work and the amount of funding in this area.

In the next parts of this section, the CPR will tell you what the departments of municipal economy and architecture, capital construction and state architectural and construction control, etc. spend the funds on.

Кирило Бойко