Departments are going through a drop in income and are struggling to finish their 2024 price range | EUROtoday

Sixty million euros right here; twenty-five million euros there; thirty million euros elsewhere… Busy with placing collectively their proposed price range for 2024, many departments are discovering that their forecasts reveal gaping holes. In query, a scissors impact, and even “shear”warn probably the most anxious: bills are hovering whereas revenues are falling.

The Loire-Atlantique departmental council, “faced with a budgetary impasse”, was unable to vote on its price range nowadays as deliberate. He took the ” difficult decision “ to postpone its adoption till the spring. “With the financial situation deteriorating very quickly, the budget would have been disingenuous”, justifies Michel Ménard, socialist president of the Loire-Atlantique group. He wrote to the President of the Republic on December 6 to tell him of those difficulties. Maine-et-Loire and Charente-Maritime, for instance, have additionally postponed the vote on their price range. “We want to have a vision for the whole year. Here, we do not yet know how much the drop in revenue will amount to”we point out to the Charente-Maritime departmental council.

Because one of many issues, explains President Ménard within the letter addressed to Emmanuel Macron, is that greater than half of the departments’ sources in the present day rely upon two recipes “volatile and completely unpredictable” : switch taxes for consideration (DMTO, or “notary fees” collected throughout actual property transactions) and a fraction of nationwide VAT distributed by the State.

Due to the actual property disaster, DMTOs are collapsing. Thus, at the beginning of 2023, Mr. Ménard thought he might depend on a income of 400 million euros. But in the present day he solely expects 310 million euros. As for VAT, the State introduced that the cost could be 9 million lower than anticipated (i.e. 304 million euros). For 2024, the president of the group due to this fact anticipates a gap of 60 million euros to fill. And, on the identical time, spending is growing. Those associated to baby safety elevated by “40% in two yearsassures Mr. Ménard, to achieve 220 million euros, in comparison with 150 million in 2021 ».

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The identical state of affairs is discovered nearly in every single place. Even if the departments are usually not all in the identical boat. Some are richer than others and may have no problem countering the jaws impact; relying on the traits of the native actual property market, tax revenues haven’t been the identical in every single place lately; populations are roughly poor relying on the placement.

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