Abstract:

In March 2020 Poland’s first case of COVID-19 was confirmed. The pandemic has been met with crisis-response and adaptive measures not only from Polish government but also local governments. In this peculiar time cities have faced an arduous situation due to new challenges and a large spike in demand for services falling under the umbrella of a municipality’s own tasks (as opposed to delegated from the central government) in the area of access to health-care, reorganization of employment and education, as well as the assurance of public safety. The surge in these tasks has consequently increased the demand for whatever was necessary in order to execute them. At the same time, some local governments have experienced a dwindling of own revenues. One of the ways in which this manifests itself in Poland is through socio-economic performance ratios of cities located in eastern provinces, characterized in.al. by own financial potential lower than the country’s average. A group of 11 such cities situated in the eastern part of Poland were selected for this study. Among themselves they are functionally and spatially diverse, also distinguished from one another by the size and structure of their respective budget revenues.