[ad_1]
Its role in everyday life is often underestimated, but the crisis clearly shows it: the country’s 2,095 municipalities struggle to survive due to a lack of tariffs and taxes. Experts warn and call for overdue structural reforms to finally be implemented.
The municipalities will soon run out of money, a diagnosis that experts, the Association of Towns and Municipalities, did not tire of making last year. The finances of the municipalities (in Austria it is 2095) are actually quite unstable after a year of pandemic: this is mainly due to the collapse of local taxes, the sharp increase in unemployment and short-term work, as well as the lack of the tourism tax, which according to the forecasts of the administrative research center (KDZ) will be reduced by half in total. Municipalities (including Vienna) are short of up to four billion euros, as Peter Biwald of the KDZ and Leonhard Plank of the TU Vienna Institute for Spatial Planning in front of journalists calculated on Tuesday.
This is a problem especially since municipalities are often responsible for the central pillars of services of general interest: in addition to their main tasks (garbage disposal, sewerage, road maintenance), they also deal with education (gardens childhood, schools), culture (libraries, music schools, museums) and leisure facilities (soccer fields, bathrooms). In Austria in particular, local self-government has a long tradition, if you think of the many municipal utility companies or cooperatives, for example.
