Operate gymnasiums and sports fields, collect rubbish, dispose of waste water: Thuringian municipalities carry out some of their state tasks with their own companies. In the larger cities, these semi-state-owned companies make more sales than in the countryside.
Erfurt (dpa/th) - Calculated per inhabitant, municipal businesses often generate more sales in larger cities than in rural areas. While many own businesses in the independent cities had a three-digit amount per inhabitant as sales in 2019 and 2020, the comparative figures in rural areas are usually significantly lower. This emerges from the response of the Thuringian Ministry of the Interior to a small request from Left MP Ralf Kalich.
According to planning, the turnover at the municipal service in Weimar was around 300 euros per inhabitant in both years. The company takes care of waste. A comparable company in the Ilm district, on the other hand, only achieved sales of around 80 or 90 euros per inhabitant in these two years according to the planning figures.
For the corresponding own operation of the Unstrut-Hainich district, the Ministry of the Interior reports sales per inhabitant of EUR 62.56 and EUR 66.22 in 2019 and 2020.
Municipalities can outsource tasks that they have to perform for their citizens, for example, to provide services of general interest to their own companies. These are companies that on the one hand belong to a municipality. On the other hand, they are run like commercial operations and thus work to a certain extent independently of the core state administration.
The local political spokesman for the left-wing parliamentary group, Sascha Bilay, said that the sales figures show that there are often much more extensive tasks in the country's larger, urban municipalities that could be outsourced to private companies than, for example, in rural areas. If, for example, a municipal company takes care of the real estate of a municipality, in rural areas it often has to worry about little more than a town hall, a kindergarten and a village community center. In the urban districts, on the other hand, there are often significantly more properties that such a private company has to manage.
