According to the definition of the tender for the replacement or replacement role of the current CEO Dalit Zilber, whoever heads the most important planning body in the real estate industry after Zilber will be defined as a manager – and not a CEO.
This is, ostensibly, a semantic matter only, but there is much more to it: As is well known, the Planning Administration – which for years operated as a unit of trust under the Interior Ministry – passed to the Ministry of Finance in 2015, at the request of then Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon. Zilber herself was appointed head of the Planning Administration in 2017, but in 2018 Minister Kahlon decided that the job definitions would be changed – and that Zilber became CEO, working under the minister, not the director general of the ministry.
Now, it seems, things will change: the tender issued by the Civil Service Commission already explicitly states that whoever heads the administration will be a manager, as he was in the past – and not a CEO as he has been for the past four years. The tender also states that “there may be organizational and managerial changes in the planning administration, as an expression of managerial and organizational change in the field of planning and construction in the Ministry of the Interior under examination.”
The organizational change in question is part of an extensive thinking currently being led by Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked regarding the structure of the Planning Administration and its optimal course of action. We will mention in the background, of course, the series of appointments that the Minister is expected to decide on in the near future, and which are also expected to have an impact on the identity of the Planning Administration and the way it operates.
In any case, it is not yet clear whether the new director of the Planning Administration will work directly with the Minister, or work under a senior official – the head of the National Planning Headquarters or the director general of the ministry, a move that will return the director of planning to its “natural dimensions”. Until the decision of the Minister of Finance Kahlon, the decision in this matter, it should be noted, should come to the door of the government for approval, so it is not at all certain that it will pass in the near future of any of the officials mentioned.
It should also be noted that today there are quite a few standards in government ministries related to real estate and defined as “only” managers – even though they head tender bodies. For Urban Renewal Adv. Elazar Bamberger.
Minister Ayelet Shaked stated: “As stated in the call for candidates, and as part of the Interior Minister’s policy to streamline and improve the planning and construction system in Israel, we are currently examining, among other things, the need for organizational and managerial change in the Planning Administration.” Accelerate, expedite and optimize planning and construction procedures to deal with the acute housing crisis that has plagued the country in recent years.
“Now that the Planning Administration has moved to the Ministry of the Interior, and given the establishment of the National Planning Headquarters at the Ministry of the Interior, the need to re-examine the organizational structure of the Planning Administration is growing, adapting to the new circumstances, the different governmental and office hostel and the important challenge facing the housing crisis.”