TOTEX not OPEX, nor CAPEX. Saving on cities’ investment tasks

While taking the floor in the discussion on how to find savings in the municipal investment projects or, in other words, how to better rationalize investment expenditures, I would like to draw attention to methodological aspect of this issue. By this I mean the approach towards balance efficiency of investment projects. I believe that in order to obtain visible results while optimizing the projects planned by units of the local governments, it is necessary to let investments’ preparations rely to a greater extent on the rolling costs of these investments. It is about basing the project calculations on the so-called TOTEX (Total Expenditures), namely the project’s total costs. Up until now, it has been a common practice that – depending if the entity that is running the project is responsible for the investment’s preparation and execution only or also for its further use – the focus has been placed on the optimization of a single stage. Put differently, suc