Lord Mayor submits draft budget for 2025/2026

Lord Mayor Sven Schulze presented the draft biennial budget for 2025 and 2026, including the financial planning for the following years, at today's City Council meeting.

Lord Mayor Sven Schulze in his speech to the City Council:
"As you can see from the current draft plan, this shows annual deficits of between just under 60 million euros and a good 160 million euros in the operating budget for the years 2025 to 2029. In total, we will be more than 600 million euros short of being able to fulfil our tasks by the end of this decade. And this is not just a purely arithmetical calculation; we will actually be short of this money in our city coffers.

And even if our income has risen continuously in recent years, it cannot even come close to keeping up with the increase in expenditure that is also taking place. There are many reasons for this:

Rising costs, particularly for social assistance and youth welfare, but also for construction and services as well as general price increases,
significantly higher personnel costs resulting from wage settlements, but also from the need to increase the number of jobs due to transferred tasks
and
the increase in energy costs and necessary higher subsidies to municipal companies

are causing municipal expenditure to rise at a rate that seemed unthinkable a few years ago.

However, this financial situation is not a problem specific to Chemnitz. No, municipal finances are "under water" everywhere in Saxony. Whether in Dresden, Central Saxony or the Ore Mountains - councils everywhere are facing the same difficult decisions.

This is because the rising costs - especially in the social sector and youth welfare - are caused, among other things, by increases in standards, primarily from federal and, in some cases, state policy. In themselves, these rising standards would not be a problem if the federal and state governments supported the local authorities accordingly. Unfortunately, however, the principle of connectivity "He who orders, pays" has long been unhinged.

This is why the local authorities' demand for fair compensation for transferred tasks is more relevant today than ever: anyone who really wants to help cities, municipalities and districts in the long term must start at precisely this point.

I will never tire of calling for this help. Both in the committees of the Saxon Association of Towns and Municipalities and in the context of consultations with the German Association of Towns and Municipalities, in the regular negotiations on the Saxon Financial Equalisation Act and also at various meetings with those responsible at federal and state level.

Hoping for adequate funding for local authorities in the near future alone will not help us here. On the contrary: at the moment, we unfortunately have to assume that a permanent and, above all, sustainable solution for the financing of cities, municipalities and districts is even further away than it already was.

...

For us, this also means scrutinising things anew that we have afforded ourselves in "good" times because we consider them to be important and right for very different reasons. This applies to both sides, to the administration and the city council alike.

And this also means that we have to say goodbye to many a fully comprehensive insurance mentality, precisely because the system of financing public tasks deliberately postulates personal responsibility and the state cannot provide everything that might be desirable.

I know that the decisions ahead of us will demand a great deal from all of you. And please believe me when I tell you that it is anything but easy for us at the top of the administration to deal with the existing cost-cutting constraints.

...

And yet we consider our proposals to be justifiable in the interests of the city as a whole in view of the general conditions described. After all, this draft plan still contains a whole host of measures that are extremely important for our city:

Starting with investments, through the promotion of sport and culture, social and youth welfare, to healthcare and green maintenance. The draft budget reflects all of this and thus creates the basis for translating political goals into practical action."

The draft budget for 2025/2026 can be viewed at