With the municipal elections just around the corner, Klaartje Peters is sounding the alarm. City councilors have too little influence on large files, the professor warns of local and regional government.
Care, environment, safety or health. These are dossiers in which aspiring councilors would like to make a difference, but over which municipalities have only limited say. Important decisions are taken at a higher level. Council members therefore have little influence on decisions by, for example, the Security Region. “We don’t have representatives of the people who keep an eye on and check what the administrators decide there, and they can’t correct it either,” said UM professor Klaartje Peters.
Decentralization paradox
Municipal councilors are often approached on matters such as youth care or windmills, because they are so close to the people. “That was often a reason to transfer the files to the municipalities,” explains Klaartje Peters. “We call this the decentralization paradox. Policy is deliberately placed at a lower level, as happened with youth care. Municipalities could make better decisions about this, closer to the people.
In practice, however, you see that the municipalities cannot perform this task on their own. Because they don’t have enough resources or not enough capacity or expertise. And then you have to carry out that task again at a regional level. That’s not how it was intended.”
no grip
The number of joint ventures between municipalities is large. “There are many more than you would think. During corona time we heard a lot about the Safety Region and GGD, those are two examples. But enforcement and environmental supervision also fit in with this, the communal social service, purchasing youth care, all of this is done together.” said the professor. According to Peters, the governance structure undermines the effectiveness and, above all, the satisfaction of municipal council work. “In my profession, public administration, we say that regional government exists. But we have not organized it well. We do not have representatives at that level.”
City councilors have little say in the joint venture budgets, which is worrying. City councilors really suffer from this in their work. It makes their work less interesting, more frustrating, more difficult and more complex. With the feeling that they have no control over the topics that are important to their citizens”
Regional Energy Strategy
Discussions about climate measures are taking place in almost all Limburg municipalities. In Sittard-Geleen, this recently led to the resignation of an alderman around the wind farm in Holtum. “A climate agreement has been concluded at the national level. A number of objectives have been formulated in it. At the regional level, part of those objectives must then be worked out. At that regional level, aldermen and civil servants have concluded deals. But in most cases they have only been went to the city council to show how they have established the regional energy strategy. Can you agree to that for a moment? Only then do the city councilors wake up and see that they have agreed in their name to build 40 or 100 wind turbines. I don’t like it, and my residents don’t want that. So you are at the end of the line as a representative of the people.”
Fourth layer of government
“A solution is very difficult,” says Peters. “We have three administrative layers in the Netherlands: the national government, the province and the municipalities. We actually do not want a fourth administrative layer between those municipalities and the province. Because then we would have to go to the polls again for a fourth type of elections. So it has always been said: we don’t do that. If we have a challenge at the regional level, we leave it to the cooperation between the municipalities. But that by definition means that administrators make compromises at that level. that is inevitable. Or you have to set up a regional board, but then you all have to go to the polls for regional elections. For example, on the scale of South Limburg. But in political The Hague that is not high on the agenda.”