The government would nationalize the Göd model and eliminate the commercial tax of many municipalities with a stroke of the pen

According to the bill presented by Zsolt Semjén on Tuesday night, the government would extend the Göd model to the entire country, where local government tax revenues were eliminated by a government decree in April.

Under the proposal, the government could declare as special economic zones those areas where at least five billion investments of national economic importance are taking place. (In Göd’s case, the minimum was still one hundred billion.)

An additional condition is that this investment must be “of significant economic importance to a significant part of the county’s territory” and “serve to avoid massive job loss or new job creation.”

These areas would become the property of the county autonomous governments led by Fidesz, that is, instead of the settlements, they would also collect the business tax from companies operating here.The county municipalities could use the money to support developments in the settlements and organizations that operate in the area. Up to three percent could go to county government operating costs.

The government was the first to reclassify the Samsung plant in Göd as a priority economic zone that, according to the current mayor, Csaba Balogh, jeopardized the sustainability of the city’s budget in the long term. The government then ordered a $ 42 billion development in the area. The mayor addressed the Constitutional Court and the Representative Bernadett Szél the Ombudsman.

Semjén’s proposal also includes the amendment already promised in November, which stipulates that the commercial tax collected by the municipalities must be used first for public transport and the remaining amount for financing social benefits. The personal allowances of public officials, related contributions and taxes can be paid from it to the extent that the local government, in accordance with its tax capacity, is “compensated by the official operating allowance”.

When this happened in the fall, many suspected that the government would withdraw from financing public transport in Budapest in this way, if only because Secretary of State Bence Tuzson said: “if István Tarlós could finance public transport in the capital, then Gergely Karácsony must know. ” .

But this is not the case, Tarlós has regularly complained in the press for years that more government support would be needed to finance BKV. We also write in detail about the unsustainable conditions this led to. Gergely Gulyás, head of the Prime Minister’s Office, said at the time that they did not intend to waste BKV funds