RIGA, Feb. 6 (Xinhua) -- Riga City Council on Thursday failed to assemble for a third extraordinary sitting in a row, thus providing legal grounds for its dissolution, local media informed.
In a bid to end the impasse the city council has run into after the disintegration of the leftist Harmony party's coalition with Honor to Serve Riga (GKR), which has been ruling in Riga for the past decade, Riga mayor Olegs Burovs agreed with opposition councilors to call three extraordinary meetings of the city council without ensuring a quorum.
After three failed meetings, the city council can be legally declared dysfunctional and dismissed by the Latvian parliament.
Earlier, Burovs admitted that the city council was no longer functional and that the only way to end the situation was to call a snap municipal election. The mayor stressed that a resolution was urgently needed because the current city council was unable to adopt the Latvian capital city's 2020 budget.
Latvia's Regional Development Minister Juris Puce who is in charge of local governments' affairs, commented that Riga City Council's self-dissolution did not make a huge difference, because its days were numbered anyway as the parliament was about to vote on the city council's dissolution next week on the grounds that the local authority has proven unable to properly organize waste management in the city.
Riga's ruling coalition of Harmony and GKR disintegrated last summer after Harmony leader Nils Usakovs was deposed as the city's long-standing mayor.
