Who actually decides where the billions from the National Program Groningen and soon Nij Begun go? And who checks whether that government money is spent properly? The Groningen States and the councils of the thirteen municipalities involved in Groningen and North Drenthe want more control over this. That is why they are putting their heads together in a new Regional Council.
The game is on the cart. Now that, after five years of pioneering, the National Program Groningen is on the eve of the final shot of another five years, the players in the field are already drawing the first lines in the sand for what will come next. The stakes are high. After all, if a total of 1.15 billion NPG money has been issued in 2029, an even larger capital injection will roll in this direction.
Over the next thirty years, The Hague will pump another 22 billion into the region to repay the ‘debt of honor’ over sixty years of unbridled gas extraction. And this time it is not limited to the six Groningen gas extraction municipalities as with the NPG. All ten municipalities in the province and three in the adjacent Kop van Drenthe should benefit from ‘Nij Begun’, as the new program has been baptized following the government’s response to the Parliamentary Inquiry into Natural Gas Extraction in Groningen.
Councils and States are struggling: how do you draw lessons for the future if you do not evaluate the past?
Serious money, which also entails a serious responsibility to seriously help the region move forward. But how? The debate on this will kick off at the end of January with a kick-off meeting in Bad Nieuweschans where administrators and politicians from the national and regional government, together with social organizations, will exchange ideas about ‘recovery and the future of Groningen’. This brainstorm will be followed up in April with a ‘broad conference’ where residents are also invited to think about what needs to be done to make ‘Nij Begun’ a success over the next thirty years.
One of the big questions in that debate is: what lessons can be learned from the NPG? And that is already the subject of a heated battle over directions. Since Johan Remkes took office as NPG chairman at the beginning of 2022, he has been steadily working on a change of course for the second part of the program. He wants to focus more heavily on economic development, in closer collaboration with the business community on themes such as hydrogen, agriculture and food, health, circular economy and the leisure economy. ‘Groundbreakers’, as these sectors are called at NPG.
But no matter how much the Groningen authorities welcome economic progress, not everyone in the region is convinced that Remkes’ course is the appropriate path to a flourishing future. And certainly not without a thorough evaluation of what its NPG organization has actually achieved for Groningen so far, and especially how.
Politics is hesitant about free work for Johan Remkes’ pioneers
The province in particular is not eager to hand over NPG money in advance for Remkes’ pioneers, which it can now invest in more socially oriented projects in the areas of welfare, education and the labor market. The States are certainly not willing to give up administrative influence for the plans of the NPG chairman. In fact, they believe that the province already has too little control.
Just before Christmas, the frustration that had been simmering in the province for months came to an explosion when deputy Susan Top threw a wrench in the executive board of the NPG board. In it, she defended the program plan in which the province lists its own NPG projects for the remaining five years.
Although Top received widespread praise from her fellow administrators, they attached one condition to their approval: NPG money for those beautiful provincial plans will only be provided if there is enough left for Remkes’ ‘pioneerers’. That completely went down the wrong way with Top, who, as former secretary of the Groningen Soil Movement Top, took office at the beginning of this year as a non-partisan deputy for the earthquake file.
“Unacceptable,” says the provincial administrator. Two days later, she expressed her disappointment in a long statement read out in the Provincial Council meeting. With this ‘guiding condition’, the NPG executive board will actually take over from the province, she argued. Why should the province give in if Remkes were to have a shortage of money? According to Top, this suggests that these pioneers should be given priority over the agreements that it makes with the States about what is desirable and necessary.
‘Major choices about major investments must be democratically guaranteed’
And this brings the deputy straight to her core point: what is actually the democratic legitimacy of the NPG’s decisions? The executive board is a selection of ten people from the seventeen-member general board, with representatives from the cabinet, province and earthquake municipalities, as well as the business community, healthcare sector and social organizations.
The government administrators in the DB formally sit there on behalf of their councils, States or Chamber, but when push comes to shove they cannot enforce anything on behalf of their supporters. As Top herself noticed when she was the only one to vote against that offending condition on her provincial program (interestingly enough, the mayors of City, Midden-Groningen and Het Hogeland were apparently in favor of it).
The deputy had delved deeply into the statutes and administrative agreements about the NPG. But she found no clarity there. Her vote against does not change the decision-making process. “It is only noted down,” she must note. This is a disturbing observation at the start of ‘NPG 2.0’. Nothing to the detriment of those pioneers (in fact, the provincial plans partly fit in seamlessly with this). “But we believe that these types of substantive choices, which often result in large investments, should be democratically guaranteed.”
On the eve of the discussion about the Nij Begun billions, this is also an alarming observation for provincial politics. Led by faction leader Gouke Moes of the BBB (not coincidentally also the party that appointed Top as director), the Groningen States unanimously adopted a motion that instructs the deputy to ‘ensure clear democratic guarantees and legitimacy at the NPG and Nij Begun ‘.
Deputy foresees difficult assignment in NPG board: ‘But I am not very popular there anyway’
Provincial politicians also want to see an evaluation of the NPG next spring. It was planned for this year, but Remkes and co have postponed it to 2025 because many projects are still too early to make a sensible judgment about them. Top therefore fears that it will be a difficult task to bring this forward, but will still make a case for it in the NPG board: “I am not very popular there now, so I have little to lose.”
At the same time, Top wants to remove the impression – especially towards the Hague financiers – that “the people of Groningen are rolling around in the streets”, as PvdA spokesperson Jan Pieter Loopstra outlines. “I don’t experience it that way,” she responds. In Nij Begun’s view, there are still significant wrinkles to be ironed out and there will probably be some fight to be done about this, but she is optimistic that this will work out: “We think that all parties involved had the same goal in mind, and will keep.”
Regional council must put politics in position for Nij Begun: ‘Collision has fueled fighting spirit’
If it were up to BBB captain Moes, politics would not wait on the sidelines. According to him, the clash in the NPG board reveals that “no one now knows exactly what is happening and who is responsible for what.” This is a concern throughout the country, and not just there. Moes had therefore previously been co-initiator of a new Regional Consultation of the Groningen States and councils of the thirteen Nij Begun municipalities in Groningen and Northern Drenthe. They each send two representatives once or twice a month for strategic consultation.
The disagreement within the NPG also yields benefits, says Moes: “It has fueled our fighting spirit as representatives. Everyone is happy with the enormous opportunity that Nij Begun offers our region. We did not get the 30 billion we hoped for, but 22 billion in public money also creates great responsibility. Spending this should not become another party for administrators. As politicians, we want to be in a position to get the most out of this. We want to fight for our role and for our residents.”