ACV concerned about savings plans City of Kortrijk
The Kortrijk college of aldermen announced its multi-year budget for the next five years on Friday. The city has calculated a deficit of 47 million euros for this, mainly due to inflation. Still, the city council is making sure that there will be no new taxes, naked layoffs or cuts in basic services. Kortrijk is postponing 35 million euros in planned investments, but has chosen these specifically to keep the impact on the Kortrijkzaan as small as possible.
Less resources
The other 12 million euros that the City of Kortrijk also needs to save will come from the day-to-day operation of the city services. Due to inflation, the additional personal income tax and the property tax will automatically yield more. The city chooses not to raise other taxes, but to index them, so that Kortrijk ultimately has to cut 4.6 million in its own expenditure.
This last saving worries the Christian trade union. The City of Kortrijk’s plan does not affect the basic services: safety, the range of Zorg Kortrijk and the maintenance of the public domain. What the politicians have tackled are the operating budgets, because they will not index for certain services. “That almost always means: continuing to do the same work but with fewer resources,” says the ACV. “This increases the stress among staff members, which means that even faster and even more failures can be expected.”
Deleted jobs
33 jobs will also disappear from the city’s workforce. This concerns, for example, employees who retire and are not replaced and white-collar workers who are given another position within the city services. The union is relieved that the financial operation does not go through the personnel costs, the “easy” victim, with a rough brush. However, the union members also criticize the way of working. “In recent years, the number of staff with a diploma of at least higher education has increased remarkably compared to the proportion of staff with a lower degree,” the ACV reports. “If you know who will ultimately have to decide within the services where staff will be reduced, then it is feared that the executive functions will also be targeted here.”
The ACV also pleads with the Kortrijk city council not to replace deleted positions by private employers. “By outsourcing certain services to private employers, staff members and costs disappear from the personnel budget, but the costs are sometimes greater in the invoices to be paid to third parties,” according to the union.
Should inflation rise further, Kortrijk’s budget deficit could also widen. Opposition party CD&V already responded that the majority underestimated the budget deficit significantly.