None, nothing, nada… If you listen to Catherine Vautrin, the Minister of Territorial Partnership and Decentralization. “Local elected officials are not responsible, we are not looking for culprits.” She said it to Le Figaro yesterday, she reaffirmed it on Inter this morning, at Sonia Devillers.
Honey, in the middle of the congress season (assembly of the departments of France last week, of the mayors of France, at the moment), with the highlight, the visit, Thursday, of Michel Barnier. It all smells like cuddle therapy.
In the wake of a Senate, chamber and champion of local democracy, which is preparing to revoke the budget, with no longer 5, but 2 billion euros of efforts on communities. At Matignon and at Catherine Vautrin, we are open, we say tight, provided we find the 3 billion in compensation.
What do you mean when you talk about “cuddle therapy”?
It’s not amnesia, it’s suddenly selective memory. Already because it is a government of ministers who have experienced the behind the scenes, the management of a community, and who, for some, still do it, cumulatively: Nicolas Daragon is in Beauvau, while being mayor of Valence.
And yet, there is no shortage of reports, very critical on the level of spending!
Which ones?
One presented in May, by Boris Ravignon, mayor of Charleville Mézières and president of Ardenne Métropole. On the cost of the overlapping of skills between local authorities: 7.5 billion euros per year!
A report that resonates with that of former Budget Minister Eric Woerth, who hunts for duplication and advocates a clarification of skills with the arrowed recipes that go with it.
And then we can cite the Court of Auditors (at the beginning of October), which recommends cutting the workforce of communities: 100,000 jobs too many, according to the magistrates, which would represent a saving of just over 4 billion euros per year. year from 2030.
And do the elected officials hear this?
It hurts their ears. For several reasons.
Firstly because local elected officials are subject to a golden rule: they are prohibited from voting for an unbalanced operating budget. If communities go into debt, it is to invest. In the ecological transition in particular.
Then, because the effort required, 5 billion out of 40, seems disproportionate to them. Their deficit, in 2023, was 0.35% of GDP. The State? 15 times more. Proportionally, communities should therefore make an effort, not of 5 billion, but of 2 and a half billion.
Is it just a matter of numbers?
No, it’s deeper than that. The great discomfort is when you are given responsibility, when you are given the skills, without the sustainable budget that goes with it. Example: the issuance of identity documents, transferred from prefectures to town halls. You need machines for that, and therefore agents to carry out this mission. On community funds.
I continue: the municipal police. The State is very happy to share this sovereign mission. This is 2.2 billion euros each year at the expense of the municipalities. The State loves to make positive announcements, about free breakfasts, canteens for 1 euro, bicycle plans. But behind that, who finances it over time? Who pays the upgraded index point for territorial civil servants? Hence the confusion: the one who announces is no longer always the one who does. And if it stops, we blame the local elected official!
So, to answer your question: rather than throwing the mistigri back, we should, once and for all, restore readability to the French millefeuille.
Act 2 of decentralization, in 2003, established the principle of subsidiarity. The skill is exercised at the most relevant level. It is still necessary that each level be autonomous in order to raise the tax which corresponds to the rung of the ladder!
Decentralization hides fiscal recentralization. We saw it on the housing tax. Louis XIV is dead, but not Colbert.
