Around 350 regional, departmental, metropolitan and municipal elected officials from Gironde denounced the “financial asphyxiation” of communities and demanded more “autonomy” for “the maintenance of a local public service”, during a gathering on Saturday in Bordeaux.
Gathered in the hall of the departmental council, these elected officials, mostly PS, EELV or LR, signed a letter intended for President Emmanuel Macron calling for clear transfers of skills, accompanied by means allowing real local political autonomy to achieve a real Girondin contract – in the historical sense of the term.
According to these elected officials, among whom was the MoDem senator Alain Cazabonne, the communities are on the verge of financial asphyxiation: the municipalities no longer have as a fiscal resource other than the tax on built land, the departments are suffering from the drop in tax revenues. of change, with the real estate crisis, and the regions have doubled their debt in four years, according to successive crises.
For Jean-Luc Gleyze, socialist president of the Gironde departmental council, the communes, the departments, the regions are suffering. At the department level, to compensate for everything we do in terms of solidarity, we are missing 1.8 billion euros over six years, these are huge sums, he added.
We want stable revenues to finance our solidarity missions, such as help for the elderly, disabled, people in integration or child protection, insisted the elected official, deploring the absence of tax levers for its institution and the insufficient financial compensation of the state.
In October 2018, several hundred Girondin elected officials from all sides organized a similar mobilization to denounce a proposed merger between department and metropolis, a few months before its abandonment.