While the Prime Minister, Michel Barnier, is working to have Parliament adopt a finance law for 2025, many departments have postponed the adoption of their own budget while waiting to know in what sauce they will be cooked. Certainly, the objective is clear, recalled, confirmed: as the Minister of Partnership with the Territories, Catherine Vautrin, tirelessly repeats, the amount of savings made by local authorities which will appear “at the bottom of the page” must be 5 billion euros.
On the modalities, things can change. It is the examination of the finance bill by the Senate, which began in committee on Wednesday November 13, which will undoubtedly allow local elected officials to see things more clearly and, above all, to discover the distribution between the strata. In the meantime, everyone is doing their homework.
This is particularly the case for departments. Because, more than municipalities and regions, they face acute financial difficulties; expenses increase when revenues fall. In Seine-et-Marne, for example, the president (Les Républicains) of the departmental council, Jean-François Parigi, expects to have to do without 70 million euros next year on a total budget of 1.7 billion euros, including 320 million in investment.
“I don’t know how I’m going to get through this”
But the room for maneuver is very narrow because departmental spending (social assistance, colleges and roads, in particular) is very constrained. “I don’t know how I’m going to get through this”confides Jean-François Parigi. The president of the department recalls that the fall in transfer taxes for onerous purposes (a tax collected when paying “notary fees”, paid by individuals when purchasing real estate), has already cost the department “100 million euros in 2023 and 50 million in 2024”.
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How to do it? Jean-François Parigi does not want to touch the “accessory skills”such as culture and sport, to refocus on compulsory skills, even if “this is what the State wants to push us to do”he considers. “That would be a mistake”he warns, because it counts in “attractiveness” of a territory and “the municipalities cannot take on this alone, without the help of the department”. In addition, confides Mr. Parigi, he ” nephew[t] not expand these areas where people have the impression of being abandoned”car “there is a link between the feeling of abandonment and the vote for the National Rally”.
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