In the article the author considers the first - after the period of active discussions -large scale changes to the federal law on the local self-government, which indicate the beginning of a qualitatively new stage of the municipal reform in the Russian Federation. In article shows that a lot of the issues, proposed nowadays as new important directions of the municipal reform development, as a matter of fact, was already offered at the stage of elaborating and discussing of the acting variant of the reform.The special attention in the paper is addressed to the fact that alongside with a set of the positive aspects, new legislative settings comprise some very disputable moments. First of all, as indicated in the article, it concerns insufficient attention to the direct forms of democracy and the participation of population in choosing both concrete institutions of local self-government and their directing bodies. The author expresses the opinion about the necessity to support in the shortest time institutional innovations in the municipal reform with strengthening of economic basis of local self-government in Russia.