Questioning many 'hot' issues after operating 2-level local government

On December 10th, at the 32nd session, the Hai Phong City People's Council held a question-and-answer session with the leaders of the Department of Agriculture and Environment, the Department of Education and Training, and the Department of Science and Technology.

The delegates voted to approve the agenda items of the session on December 9th.

Addressing the issue of delays in issuing land use right certificates.

During the question-and-answer session, delegate Nguyen Hoang Phuong pointed out that Hai Phong city currently has many landfills for household waste in rural communes, causing environmental pollution. The collection, transportation, and treatment of waste currently do not meet practical needs. The progress of constructing and putting into operation solid waste treatment plants in the city is also slow.

Representative Nguyen Hoang Phuong also shared that, after implementing the two-tiered local government system, the time taken to process land procedures, especially the issuance and exchange of land use right certificates, is still slow, and requested that relevant agencies promptly find solutions to overcome this problem.

Responding to questions, the Director of the Department of Agriculture and Environment, Bui Van Thang, stated that the city generates approximately 3,300 tons of solid household waste per day. This solid waste is processed at 7 centralized treatment facilities at the provincial and former district levels, with a processing capacity of approximately 2,120 tons per day. In addition, there are 482 small-scale landfills in rural areas with a processing capacity of approximately 820 tons per day. Since July 1st, the collection, transportation, and processing of solid household waste has been transferred to the People's Committees at the commune level for management, with contracts signed with collection, transportation, and processing units. This has basically met the needs of the people and the pace of urbanization. However, environmental sanitation management in some localities is not yet rigorous, posing a risk of overload and environmental pollution, leading to the spontaneous emergence of small, scattered landfills, especially in border areas with low population density.

To address waste management, the Department of Agriculture and Environment has advised the People's Committee of Hai Phong City to issue Plan No. 323/KH-UBND dated December 9, 2025, on organizing the collection, transportation, and treatment of solid household waste in Hai Phong City in 2026. Accordingly, the People's Committees of communes, wards, special zones, and localities are responsible to the People's Committee of Hai Phong City for any instances of illegal waste dumping causing environmental pollution and for addressing public complaints. Hai Phong is also currently implementing investment procedures for the construction of two solid waste treatment plants using incineration technology with energy recovery, each with a capacity of 1,000 tons/day.

For existing landfills, the Department of Agriculture and Environment will organize their closure, plant trees to restore the environment on-site, or excavate, remove, relocate, and transport the buried waste to a centralized, sanitary treatment facility.

Regarding the slow issuance of initial land use right certificates, the Director of the Department of Agriculture and Environment, Bui Van Thang, stated that land procedures are complex, involving multiple levels, sectors, and agencies working together; and are also related to many other relevant legal regulations. The Department is urgently developing a standardized cadastral map system as a basis for extracting cadastral data of land parcels (replacing land surveying and mapping), which will help reduce costs and shorten the time required to process land procedures.

The Department of Agriculture and Environment is also coordinating with relevant agencies and communes, wards, and special zones to enrich and clean up the national land database; it has synchronized 1,114,746 land parcels into the national land database, achieving 100% of the land parcels in the city's land database.

The Department continues to restructure and standardize internal processes, updating electronic procedures to reuse cleaned and enriched land data in order to reduce and simplify the components of dossiers, the number of dossiers, the time, and the process of carrying out administrative procedures.

According to Mr. Bui Van Thang, from July 1, 2025 to the present, the volume of land registration change applications (including procedures for issuing and exchanging land use right certificates) received and processed by the Land Registration Office system alone is over 174,000 applications, averaging 1,453 applications per day.

Improving the quality of education and training

At the session, delegate Nguyen Van Kinh reflected that in Hai Phong city, there is still a shortage of schools and classrooms, as well as an imbalance in distribution across areas. This leads to people having to send their children to independent daycare centers and kindergartens, even though the facilities in these places are limited, the quality of care and education is not guaranteed, and the tuition fees are significantly higher than in public schools.

Responding to the delegates' concerns, Director of the Department of Education and Training Luong Van Viet stated that the Department is reorganizing educational institutions from preschools to vocational schools to align with the two-tiered local government model, ensuring opportunities for students. The Department is coordinating with relevant departments and agencies to review and utilize surplus offices and facilities after reorganization to expand school capacity. The Department of Education and Training has reviewed, identified, and proposed the scale and distribution of public school networks in areas where there is a shortage.

According to Mr. Luong Van Viet, the Department has advised the city to implement various preferential mechanisms regarding land and investment procedures; prioritizing clean land plots in favorable locations within urban planning projects, housing areas, industrial zones, and worker housing areas to attract capable investors to open more schools. Relevant agencies will also review needs, standardize criteria for high-quality private schools, and strengthen post-inspection to ensure that private institutions participating in the education system are those that meet quality standards.

To alleviate the financial burden on families with children attending private schools, in addition to central government mechanisms and policies, Hai Phong has issued a resolution on tuition fee exemptions and support within the city. The Department of Education and Training is strengthening the public disclosure and transparency of information on qualified private educational institutions, tuition fees, and service charges on its electronic portal; and is intensifying inspections, corrections, and handling of schools and classes that collect fees incorrectly, exceed commitments, or fail to ensure quality services, in order to protect the rights of students and parents and improve the quality of education.

Also at the questioning session, Director of the Department of Science and Technology Nguyen Cao Thang stated that the Department is implementing a comprehensive set of technological solutions and business processes, standardizing data structures from the input stage, shifting from document storage to structured data storage; applying new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and optical character recognition (OCR) to automatically extract information from scanned documents into digital data; focusing on training and developing digital skills for officials and employees to change working habits, shifting from paper-based processing to processing entirely in a digital and data-driven environment….

The Department of Science and Technology is actively advising the City People's Committee to focus resources on perfecting and aiming for "accurate, complete, clean, active, unified, and shared" data to best serve the leadership and management work. The Department is strengthening analytical and forecasting tools; coordinating with other departments and agencies to promote the connection and integration of data between specialized information systems and the Intelligent Operations Center (IOC) so that leaders at all levels can access information promptly without waiting for consolidated reports from subordinates…

Source: https://baotintuc.vn/thoi-su/chat-van-nhieu-van-de-nongsau-van-hanh-chinh-quyen-dia-phuong-2-cap-20251210122926428.htm