ZELS - the Association of Units of Local Self-Government - is officially setting up a fire crisis headquarters. The decision was taken at a Management Board session. The goal: faster and more effective coordination between municipalities when summer fires hit. And they will hit.

Orce Đorđievski, ZELS president, announced the move on Facebook. "The safety of citizens, the protection of property and a timely response must be our shared priority," he wrote. And immediately after - the meaningful part of the statement: this is a systemic move, not a daily response.

Last year's summer fires in North Macedonia burned for weeks. Forest fires in Mavrovo, steppe fires in Kumanovo and Kratovo, fires at landfills in hundreds of locations. Coordination between municipalities was the obvious problem - when one municipality had available firefighting equipment, another had no idea that equipment existed.

The crisis HQ is supposed to solve that: a central point where information on available crews, vehicles, materials and logistics is shared in real time. On paper - a fine idea. The question is whether it will actually function when the first serious fire breaks out - or whether it will stay an institutional formality.

At the same time, ZELS made another interesting move. The new president of the Energy Regulatory Commission, Aco Ristov, attended the session, where the talk turned to setting up local energy companies. The idea: municipalities use solar panels to generate electricity, and put it on the market for additional revenue.

For a Balkan context this is serious news. Municipalities as energy players - that's a model already running in Austria, Germany, Switzerland. Local authorities install solar arrays on public buildings - kindergartens, schools, municipal offices - and then sell the surplus to the grid. The revenue funds local services. If this actually happens, it would be a much bigger structural shift than any firefighting HQ.

For now, caution - setting up a fire HQ is simpler than founding a local energy utility with all the required certificates, licences, technical capacity. ZELS announced. The question is - which municipalities will actually do it, and which will stop at the statement.