As of: March 14, 2024, 11:59 a.m
By: Klaus Kuhn
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Should pour money into the cash-strapped municipal coffers: the expansion of the Straßäcker industrial area.
© Klaus Kuhn
It won't work any other way: The Langenpreising municipality's 2024 budget provides for borrowing of 5.8 million euros.
Langenpreising - Even after intensive consultation in the responsible committee last Monday, according to treasurer Tanja Göbl in an interview with the local newspaper, this amount cannot be reduced significantly.
This was despite the fact that the committee members had still cut out quite a bit in several dozen, sometimes painful, individual decisions, including in the capital budget, amounting to 1,000 euros.
The same thing had happened before in the administrative budget.
It wasn't subject to entertainment tax: here 500 euros, there 5,000 euros. The councilors struggled through the proposal for almost two and a half hours.
In the end, however, they were able to report a small success: the deficit in the administrative budget was reduced from an initial 340,000 to 285,000 euros.
A regular repayment of 203,000 euros makes it clear: At the end of the consultation, the administrative budget was still missing almost half a million, because according to the legal requirements, this should generate a surplus equal to the amount of the regular repayment.
But it doesn't work like that.
As was previously the case in Wartenberg (we reported), although not as clearly, Mayor Josef Straßer (FWG) criticized the chronic underfinancing of the municipalities.
On Tuesday evening he reported at the meeting of the entire local council that the administration had managed to achieve slightly better figures.
He couldn't yet say exactly which ones, down to the euro.
The district office had come up with a “ten-point program” on how the municipality could get its budget back on track.
But what Göbl read out turned out to be of little help: there was a demand that voluntary services be subjected to a critical review.
The community has already done this in previous years and even reduced club subsidies.
They didn't want to touch the taxes again.
That had already been done, the mayor reminded, and there was no opposition to it.
He interpreted the somewhat helpless information from the district office as saying that they wanted to see “signs” that “the community is doing something.”
And Göbl really had something to show for this: a total waiver of borrowing in 2023, repayments of current loans amounting to 800,000 euros in the previous year, and an increase in the general reserve.
According to Straßer, this is something to be proud of.
“Now let’s just send it up and then we’ll see what happens.”
The huge loan authorization is mostly due to mandatory tasks: fire department equipment house (€1.26 million), kindergarten (€3.96 million), fire engine (€290,000), and the reconstruction of the intersection on Landshuter Straße (2.1 million euros), these are the big chunks.
On the other hand, there is income from property sales, especially in commercial areas.
According to the plan, the local council will adopt the budget at the April 16 meeting.
However, Straßer made it clear that this meeting would probably have to be postponed.