PRIORITIES REGARDING THE MANAGEMENT OF PUBLIC UTILITY SERVICES IN THE WESTERN REGION OF ROMANIA

Public utility services are an important vector for the development of regional and local communities. Providing these services is equally important to citizens, central, regional and local authorities, and academics. The management of public utility services needs to be completed in the spirit of an efficient and performant process. This paper highlights the perception of the users of public utility services regarding the quality of various public services. Also, it identifies potential improvement measures that can be adopted by the authorities with competences in the field of utility services. In this respect, we apply a methodology based on the survey method, considering a sample of 220 respondents, between December 2014 and April 2015 at the level of the Western Region of Romania, namely the counties of Timis, Caras-Severin, Arad and Hunedoara. The main conclusion of the study reveals users’ dissatisfaction with the quality of public utility services provision, as well as the lack of communication between authorities and citizens.The results of the present paper can form a basis for well-grounded proposals for efficient measures which need to be implemented by local and regional authorities in order to improve the provision of public utility services.