In Poland, we have little than 2.5 1000 municipalities – this is comparatively fewer compared to another European countries (in Germany, with an area akin to Poland, there are about 11,000 of them; in tiny Austria, more than 2 000 of them), but besides the obligations of the Polish municipality are greater than in another countries. Polish municipalities are responsible, among others, for spatial governance, collective transport, primary education or municipal services. Each municipality in Poland must have a mayor, mayor or president at its head and a municipal council (relatively the city) with a minimum of 15 members. The municipalities in Poland have a budget which consists primarily of own income (i.e. what the municipality collects from taxes directly, as well as part of the PIT and CIT taxation paid by residents and companies from the municipality) and subsidies (i.e. the funds which the state budget transfers to municipalities for the implementation of circumstantial activities, especially the maintenance of schools).
The problem is that in Poland many municipalities be only to supply the local elite with comparatively well paid, safe jobs.
These municipalities do not have the funds for investments, they increasingly do not even have the funds for the day-to-day operation. Worse still, specified municipalities do not have the resources to prepare the area for investments by external entities — they do not have the capacity to arm the area, to scuttle land or to advance their investment sites, due to the fact that the full budget simply eats up the current functioning of the municipality. Is there anything you can do? Yes, these municipalities can be linked to others.
Why do we request duble municipalities alternatively of urban-rural municipalities?
Let us start with where changes — and associated savings — could be made most easily. The existence of tiny municipalities is usually justified by the request to keep a comparative proximity to the municipal office. In Poland, however, there are 143 pairs of municipalities (meaning 286 municipalities in total), where the tiny town is surrounded by a agrarian commune of the same name, besides based in that town.
Take, for example, the mill Cruiser in Lublin. This is simply a very rapidly depopulating area that has never been peculiarly densely populated. For any reason, however, there is simply a separate municipality for the town of Rejowiec Fabryczny (less than 4,000 inhabitants) and a separate agrarian municipality Rejowiec Fabryczny (3,9 1000 inhabitants) based in the mill Rejowiec – and not just any place in Rejowiec, but in precisely the same building as the city office! It is so hard to argue that residents of the agrarian municipality Rejowiec Fabryczny must have a separate commune in order to have closer to office.
So why 2 municipalities here? 1 might be tempted to say that it is for what, to supply local elite proverbial warm jobs. It turns out that we can at least partially support this claim with data. In Poland there is an institution of the urban-rural commune, which would be perfect for situations specified as Rejowec, a tiny town surrounded by agrarian areas. According to comparative data, specified municipalities are more financially efficient than the 2 municipalities. This is intuitive — you don’t gotta duplicate many positions — but to illustrate the situation on the illustration below, I show expenditure on public administration in urban-rural municipalities and the combined spending on this intent in municipal pairs in a situation specified as Rejowec (i.e. a tiny town which is simply a separate municipality from the agrarian bagel municipality next to it).
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