‘I’m not going to resign unless I feel positive that the new city-managing system is viable,’ Mayor of Yekaterinburg Arkadiy Chernetskiy announced at a press conference in the town hall.

Chernetskiy also said the idea of a people-elected mayor who’d also chair the municipal Duma plus a Duma-appointed head of the administration looked good to him.

The mayor added that the current system had a lot of advantages; for one, it protected Yekaterinburg from incompetent people in power. He stressed that any changes in the way a city is administered had to be made extremely carefully.

Arkadiy Chernetskiy is planning to meet the members of the Right To Elect committee today; the committee is trying to protect the current system of mayor elections.

‘I am also willing to consider changing the venue of the upcoming public hearings from the town hall to the much more comfortable Cosmos movie theater,’ he added.