EIt was “deeply engraved” on him, says Hans-Günter Henneke, Chief Executive of the German District Association, as the later Federal Minister of Justice Edzard Schmidt-Jortzig said as a young university lecturer in 1986: State tasks were invented at the upper levels, but then afterwards, including financing , “pushed down” to the lower levels. The result is municipalities that are not only robbed of financial leeway by the “suppression mechanism”, but also make self-government in dispute.
Mr. Henneke, how could this mechanism be broken?
It took a long time, but the President of the Federal Administrative Court and his Senate mustered this strength in the judgment on the district levy in January 2013. I represented the affected district at the time and actually suffered a defeat. Because the judgment said that it is inadmissible to push away the necessary costs of the districts for the fulfillment of their tasks on the municipalities. There must be an absolutely protected minimum financial resource for the communities. From the perspective of the counties, that was a defeat, but from the perspective of local self-government, it was a magnificent victory. All compulsory tasks and a minimum of voluntary tasks must be able to be fulfilled by all municipalities without long-term borrowing, assuming economic task fulfillment. The country has to guarantee this in the “entirety of its regulations”.
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