Urban violence, pension reform, fight against Covid-19… Faced with emergencies, the State has gotten into the habit of calling on municipalities for help. In the aftermath of the riots [à la suite de la mort de Nahel M., 17 ans, tué le 27 juin par un policier lors d’un contrôle à Nanterre], I went to the Elysée at the invitation of the President of the Republic. Personally, after leaving this meeting, I felt a feeling of dismay, shared by many of the mayors and elected officials present. And we had to wait until October to see the interministerial committee of cities, postponed for a year, meet.
If the mayor is the French people’s favorite elected official, it is because he is closest to them. Only he can have a detailed understanding of the daily lives of our fellow citizens and be capable of re-establishing the dialogue between France above and France below, the rupture of which appears to be complete. The State should therefore not wait for crises to listen to us. It should stop reducing our room for maneuver, by gradually eliminating our skills and local taxation. The time has come to give us the means to act before the mayors have all resigned.
“The State makes big announcements, like: we are going to create ten thousand nursery places, welcome migrants, deploy more police officers on the ground… And then, legitimately, everyone comes to see us to demand accountability”declared Jean-Christophe Fromantin, the mayor of Neuilly-sur-Seine (Hauts-de-Seine), in a weekly interview Point published on May 20.
The State does not owe everything. However, today, decentralization is broken down. “Our country still remains marked by a strong centralizing tradition”write the magistrates of the Court of Auditors in their annual report, estimating that if “the first two phases of decentralization, from 1982 to 1986 (act I), then in 2003 and 2004 (act II), effectively resulted in significant transfers of skills and the consecration in the Constitution of the main principles of decentralization (…) the reforms carried out since 2010 have not made it possible to remedy the defects noted then”.
Total confusion
Why this failure? For fifteen years, contradictory laws have piled up, the perimeters of regions or metropolises have expanded without anthropological reality and in a total confusion of “who does what?” » in the metropolises of Paris, Lyon and Aix-Marseille-Provence. The State is gradually regaining control over local finances by drying up our municipalities’ own resources (professional tax, housing tax, contribution on the added value of businesses), insidiously imposing its supervision.
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