A few brave villages bravely resist the merger rage of Dutch municipalities. Outgoing is one of those. “With one leg Uitgeest stands in Kennemerland, and with the other in the BUCH, but for the time being we still manage ourselves. Every municipality wants to remain its own!?” asks Guus Krom, who has been in the Uitgeester city council for 22 years, rhetorically.
“We are a small village that has always been able to manage itself,” says Guus Krom about ‘her’ Uitgeest. And that is something to cherish, she thinks. Krom was the founder of the Uitgeester Vrije Party twenty years ago, and was elected to the city council again last week with one seat for the party.
What makes Uitgeest, Uitgeest? Why shouldn’t the village merge with Heemskerk and Beverwijk on the one hand, or the municipality of Castricum on the other? Since 2017 there has even been a ‘cooperation at administrative level’ with Bergen, Uitgeest, Castricum and Heiloo, the BUCH for short.
That was not a step in the right direction for Krom, on the contrary. She sees evidence in the merger that Uitgeest must guard its independence as much as possible in the future.
No short lines
“Benefits have been promised. But I don’t see them, I don’t even know what advantages they would be anymore. What I do see is that Uitgeest has to adhere to certain agreements of BUCH. We are no longer as independent as we were .”
Marijke Twisk, secretary of the village council of Uitgeest, sees this too. “The ordinary Uitgeester has short lines, it doesn’t feel like a big hassle, so the more they can control themselves, the better. When Uitgeest was absorbed into the BUCH, we wondered at the Village Council: will the lines remain short? “
No, thinks Twisk. Last week she saw an example of the consequences of a ‘logged, large-scale organisation’. “We got a special tree in the Prinses Beatrixlaan. Years ago via the University of Cambridge and planned there by an Uitgeester.”
No longer from the BUCH
“The tree would have grown from a graft of the tree under which Newton was sitting when he had his famous hunch. But the tree was suddenly felled. Why? I’m still waiting for the answer to that question.”
Whether this incident would not have happened if BUCH did not exist is uncertain. But for Twisk and Krom it is clear that merging into a larger whole does not benefit these kinds of issues.
“I try to guard as many things as possible, it doesn’t always work,” Krom is realistic. “Look, we can’t get out of the BUCH anymore, we’re in it, and that’s just a fact.”
splits
But Uitgeest finds herself in a strange dilemma with this collaboration, she says. “On the other hand, we are in the Kennemerland Safety Region (VRK), which includes Heemskerk, Beverwijk and Haarlem.”
Krom: “That is because Uitgeest is still just in the risk area of Schiphol and the Hoogovens. And we cannot get out of that VRK. We should not want to, by the way. It is the best Security Region in the Netherlands.”
Uitgeest has a lot of its own, so that doesn’t make collaboration necessary, Twisk thinks. “With a good connection with the A9 and a good train connection, we have a very good base position.”
Moreover, the village is not located near an ever expanding city. Like Weesp, which will go up in Amsterdam tomorrow. Yet the ‘dangers’ to independence come from outside, both Krom and Twisk foresee.
“In order to remain financially healthy, and therefore to be able to stand on its own two feet, the municipality has also divested some things, such as the library and the swimming pool. And then there are volunteers who put their shoulders to the wheel,” says Twisk.
In order to remain independent, the atmosphere of ‘us-knows-us, everyone knows each other and everyone greets each other when we go shopping’, says Krom, however. She sees with sorrow how the youth of Uitgeester can hardly continue to live in the village, while people as far as Den Helder can register for the sparse free homes.
Publishers in the Noordkop?
“I also understand that everyone wants to come and live in Uitgeest, but the other way around, do Uitgeesters want to go to the top of North Holland? Really not. Don’t get me wrong, everyone is welcome and that is also nice, but Uitgeesters also have to live in Uitgeest can stay. And whether that is the case remains to be seen.”
Twisk wholeheartedly agrees: “If you want to be proud of your village, you also have to have people with a connection to the history of the village. Otherwise you might get fragmented.”
And that can also have consequences in politics, she thinks: “Politics is also just a result of what cohesion you are looking for”, thinks Twisk. “The moment you lose your identity, then a logical consequence is that at a certain point you can no longer prioritize things and then a consequence is that you collaborate more easily with others.”