Potholes and corruption.

I've been doing a lot of driving through the Jiu Valley lately -- back and forth to Petroșani in the clunky old FNO van to pick people up from the train station, to and from Uricani on the maxi taxi to go rock climbing and visit churches and look for used furniture, and so on.  The roads through the Jiu Valley are pretty awful, as you might expect in a relatively poor, industrial area of Romania with a single main road between the mountains.

But here's the thing.  Yesterday I visited both Vulcan and Uricani with a friend from work, and here's what I realized: Lupeni's roads are the worst.  By a long shot.  In fact, the whole city is run down in a way that even its neighbors are not.  Vulcan has smoothly-paved sidewalks with -- get this! -- a bike lane painted on them.  There are fountains in the median of the main street, and flowers and green grass growing all over the place, and very little trash on the streets and almost no street dogs.  Seriously.  There are a few potholes as you leave town, but for the most part things are well-maintained and clean and thriving.  But drive across the municipal boundary into Lupeni, the next town west in the valley, and you're greeted by the thuds and bangs of potholes, trash and street dogs, and general disrepair.  As you leave Lupeni and enter Uricani, the town furthest to the west before you start to really get close to Retezat National Park, things improve again -- Uricani is tiny and poor as well, but at least their city center is well-maintained and clean and colorful, the streets in town have speed bumps and are pothole-free, and parks are groomed and free of trash.

So what gives, Lupeni?

The answers to that are complicated, but a lot of it boils down to corruption.  The mayor of Vulcan is fabulous, actively involved in the improvement of his community -- and it shows.  For goodness' sake, they have fountains!  But the mayor of Lupeni?  You don't have to ask many people to get a feel for how this community feels about him.  I've been told many times that the city hall doesn't do anything, that money which is supposed to be allocated for civic projects ends up in the pockets of the local administrators, and that most of the problems here are the fault of the mayor.  (Read our earlier street dog post to learn more about that.)   A few weeks ago FNO received 5,000 lei (that's about $1,650 US) from the city hall for its public activities in the next year.  This is a great achievement, as it took a lot of persistent youth and meetings to receive that money.  However, compared to the 10,000 euros (that's almost $13,000 US) of public money that the mayor spent on a trip to London for local administrators, it's not much.  People protested that misuse of public money, so the donation to FNO is perhaps supposed to appease... but I guess we'll have to wait and see at election time.

But that's the other thing I have to admit that I don't understand.  The corruption is so obvious, and so universally-known, that I can't wrap my head around why the mayor has been in office for so long -- almost a decade!  Why does he keep getting re-elected?  Why, with the money theft and mismanagement and the potholes and obvious neglect of public spaces, and with the clear testimonies of Vulcan and Uricani so nearby, does Lupeni stand for it?  This is what I want to know.  And it's something I don't know if I'll ever understand.