“The Moldovan authorities decided to transfer the powers from central level to the local level because the people live their lives in their settlements, not on TV or on the pages of certain strategies. The people should not feel the distance that sometimes exists between their lives and the decisions that affect them directly,” President Nicolae Timofti said in a conference themed “Experience of local democracy in the transformation process”, Info-Prim Neo reports. According to the presidential press service, Nicolae Timofti and the Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski, who is in Chisinau on an official visit, took part in the conference that was held to mark the creation of an information center for the local public authorities of Moldova, with the support of a group of Polish experts. Nicolae Timofti stated that the functioning of this center is a relevant example of the Moldovan – Polish cooperation and thanked his counterpart for the support provided by Poland in this respect. He stressed the importance of the power decentralization reform in Moldova as a form of democratizing society and strengthening the state. “Civil society should be also involved in this process. If it is timid, it must be supported and developed,” said the head of state. He also said that too many experiments as regards the territorial-administrative structure have been done in Moldova over the last 20 years. “We had a central power system that allowed not much space for action and put minimum responsibilities on the local public authorities. We want to correct this system so that it serves the people,” said Nicolae Timofti. For his part, Bronislaw Komorowski spoke about Poland’s experience in restructuring the local public administration. “In the 1990s, many statesmen and public servants of Poland were skeptical about and even frightened of the initiatives to reform the public administration. They were afraid that after the power is decentralized, we will lose our identity and language and the economy will collapse. But time passed and those people, as well as the whole society, see the remarkable results of the decentralization of power in Poland,” he said. The Polish President encouraged the Moldovan mayors attending the conference to use the modern forms of administration and to engage the population in the local projects.