Dear Reader,

It is my pleasure to be able to present the Annual Report of the Vysočina Region 2006 to you. By way of introduction, it is a good idea, I believe, to mention that the Annual report is the result of relatively long and extensive discussions. For several years, namely, the majority amongst us believed that since all the data and other information normally presented in annual reports are available to anyone over the Internet anyway, as part of the public access policy, it is not necessary to summarize these data every year and issue them in the form annual reports.

Despite this quite logical point of argumentation, we finally decided to start publishing annual reports about our Region from the year 2006 onwards, the reason being that we want expand the opportunity and make the public’s access to information on Vysočina more user-friendly.

The main objective of issuing this Annual Report on Vysočina (this year and in the years to come, I hope) is to present summarized information on the status of our Vysočina Region and on the changes that took place or impacted substantially on the life in Vysočina during the given year.

Let me point out, in this introductory part, some of the events that were of key importance to Vysočina in 2006, as some of the circumstances were interesting and substantial in my opinion.

The year 2006 was a turning point for Vysočina as the Region’s political representation finally reached an agreement as to how to proceed in the area of long-term reparation of the transport infrastructure of Vysočina, i.e., the roads. Voting about taking out a loan from the European Investment Bank and about approval of the Regional Operational Program found support across the whole political spectrum of the Regional Board’s representatives.