Bad surprise: Millions are missing from the budget of the city of Dachau

Created: 2022-11-17Updated: 2022-11-17 5:31 p.m

By: Stefanie Zipfer

The city is missing millions, the district office will probably not approve the city budget.

© dpa

Actually, the Main Committee of the City Council should have approved the Treasury's draft budget for 2023.

But instead of a resolution, the realization came at the end: the city is missing millions, the district office will probably not approve the city budget, and the mayor definitely doesn't want to be responsible.

Dachau – Words of power actually have a bad reputation in politics.

On Wednesday, after a three-hour, tiring discussion that apparently led nowhere in the main and finance committee of the city council, the time had come: CSU spokesman Florian Schiller urgently asked Mayor Florian Hartmann for "a decent specification" or a "sign", where Hartmann wanted to go "with his city's budget".

Otherwise, according to Schiller, he would have to come to the conclusion: "The mayor doesn't want to set a line."

The mayor, however, refused Schiller's request: No, he would "deliberately not set a line, that's not my job".

The drawing up of a budget is "Ur-Highness of the City Council".

Even when Schiller remarked that the mayor was also involved in every single spending decision and that he therefore wanted at least "a rough outline", Hartmann did not want to answer.

Schiller's question "What do we expect from our budget?" remained unanswered for the remainder of the session.

Mayor emphasizes: "It has never been so difficult to get a valid data basis for budget calculations."

What Hartmann repeatedly emphasized, however, was that it had never been so difficult to get a valid data basis for budget calculations as it was this year.

The administration faces the problem of not knowing "which numbers we should take".

One thing is certain: the figures for the budget draft of the Treasury, which was presented for the first time in October, were partly wrong

One thing is certain since Wednesday: the figures for the budget draft of the finance department, which was presented for the first time in October, were partly wrong.

Instead of the "positive number base" that the working group on tax estimates of the Federal Ministry of Finance had given in October, the legal supervision of the district office is now based on the much more pessimistic tax estimates of the State Office for Statistics.

This predicts that the income tax increase calculated by the AK tax estimate should not come.

Millions are missing from the budget of the city of Dachau

The result: the Dachau budget draft for 2023 is suddenly missing millions of revenues.

There is a hole of 4.5 million euros in the administrative budget.

In view of the skyrocketing energy costs and the enormous investment plans – combined with an 8 million euro loan – the legal supervisory authority saw “the city’s financial capacity not being assured”.

Treasurer Thomas Ernst therefore repeated on Wednesday what he has been writing to the city councilors for months in every draft resolution: The city must save, only "essential" expenses may be made!

However, instead of heeding this advice, some city councilors would have "sniffed it out because of the paper consumption"!

Two camps formed in the city council

In view of Ernst's words and Lord Mayor Hartmann's reluctance, two camps appeared to have formed in the committee.

While Jürgen Seidl (FDP) and Florian Schiller (CSU) were still trying to find savings opportunities when reviewing the 500-page set of figures and also following the instructions of the district office to check voluntary spending in particular, the SPD, the Greens and the alliance seemed to be doing so wanting to take the risk for Dachau of possibly presenting a budget that cannot be approved to the district office.

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The city needs to save

Dennis Behrendt (SPD), for example, emphasized that he had “worked sensibly” and that it “cannot be the goal” to reduce spending even further.

His parliamentary colleague Christa Keimerl also warned against reducing the voluntary grants for culture and sport: "Then the lights will go out in many areas of the city." Richard Seidl (Greens) admitted that the budget that had been put together in the past few weeks should not be approved, taken by surprise and even overwhelmed: "We have the problem that we have to prioritize now, but I lack the overview."

City councils are eliminating individual posts

In the end, therefore, the decision was made not to decide anything.

Chamberlain Ernst has to rework.

As was learned, the city councilors found a few pranks in the non-public part of the meeting.

Ernst doesn't know whether these savings attempts are enough to get the budget approved by the legal supervisory authority.

But he definitely wants to try: "We shouldn't be the only municipality that has these problems!"

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