Contemporary Municipalities in Germany

Abstract

Nowadays most Japanese municipalities tend to merge into larger units with the purpose of strengthening their administrative and financial capacity. However, I have seen no information about countries executing or planning such a merger in mainland Western Europe. I therefore felt a great interest in making clear the reasons why these countries can maintain municipalities with small populations and why they do not need to merge municipalities.In this paper I show the present situation of municipalities in Germany. As is generally known, however, Germany is a federal republic with different systems of municipalities in each state so that it is not possible to show all systems in a short paper. Therefore, I will try to describe the situation of only two states of Rhineland-Palatinate and Lower Saxony with twofold structured municipalities: that is, Verbandsgemeinde and Samtgemeinde, in addition to the normal-type municipalities (Einheitsgemeinde).Due to administrative reform executed in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, twofold structured municipalities were introduced in these states; the combined municipalities with a population of 5, 000-7, 500 were formed by merging small municipalities or by keeping the original small municipalities as independent local municipalities. In such a municipal system, not only the combined municipalities but also the local municipalities have their own mayors and assemblies, respectively. The citizens elect a mayor and members of the assembly directly in both combined and local municipalities.The merit of this system exists in the fact that it combines the maintenance of the authority of small municipalities with an administration capacity of high quality. The combined municipalities undertake the specific tasks of administration entrusted from local municipalities and the state. They are supported financially by the Umlage (tax payment) paid by local municipalities and the Schlusselzuweisungen (state subsidy) supplied from the state. Although the total cost of the twofold structured municipalities tends to be a little higher than the normal-type municipalities, the citizens do not consider it to be a heavy burden. A mayor of a local municipality does his work gratis only a few hours per week using his house as an office and visits the town hall once a week.In comparison with the systems of Amt and Verwaltungsgemeinschaft, Verbandsgemeinde and Samtgemeinde have a more powerful system of combined municipalities. They are very similar, but not the same. A Samtgemeinde must contain a maximum of 10 local municipalities with more than 400 inhabitants, whereas there is no such rule for a Verbandsgemeinde. However, in the case of the latter, the population of the largest local municipality must not surpass half of the total population. Most municipalities in Rhineland-Palatinate form Verbandsgemeinde, while in Lower Saxony the municipalities forming Samtgemeinde are not in a majority and they tend to be distributed in the peripheral area of the state. In Rhineland-Palastinate, both Verbandsgemeinde and local municipalities receive Schlusselzuweisungen, while this is the case in Lower Saxony only for Samtgemeinde. It seems that a Samtgemeinde seems to have broader powers and to be more autonomous than a Verbandsgemeinde.The conflicts between combined and local municipalities or between local municipalities are, even if they do not exist in the system, actually observable, owing to the complicated system of administration. Compared to the normal-type municipalities it takes longer for the combined municipalities to make a decision because of the existence of various local municipalities with various population scales and financial situations.