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OfMichael Seeholzer
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The Common Good Economy Association in Ebersberg presented a new certification. It should make living together more sustainable and worth living.
Ebersberg – What can municipalities do for the common good? A lot, said Kirchanschöring’s mayor Hans-Jörg Birner (CSU) on Friday evening. The town hall chief from Rupertiwinkel in the Traunstein district was invited as a speaker by Lakhena Leng and Georg Hengster from the Ebersberg regional group of the Common Good Economy Association.
“Unterm First” in the old monastery building yard, Birner told us what it does to a municipality when it suddenly feels committed to the common good in all its areas and is the first municipality in Germany to have this certified.
The “eco-grassroots movement” is still relatively young and appeared about ten years ago. In the meantime, a handful of other municipalities have been certified according to these guidelines. Not many of them are yet, and the Ebersberg regional group also has just ten members. But the goals are all the greater: People and the environment should be the focus of action by the municipality. This affects citizens and employees alike, the building activities of the municipality, their purchasing and services, the fair treatment of business partners – or the question: “Do you really earn what you earn?”
The point system should lead to rewards
According to the initiators, a point system is to be connected to the certification for the participating municipalities, which ranges from a maximum of plus 1000 to 3600 minus points. According to this, a municipality that has proven to be particularly sustainable in terms of certification for the common good should be rewarded with taxes, have better cards when it comes to granting grants and receive particularly cheap loans from the participating banks – among other things because they give their employees more thanks to the bank paid than just the minimum wage for cleaning staff, for example.
Birner said that getting certified was no walk in the park. But the more the employees of his municipality were allowed to present the successes they had gradually achieved to the public, the greater the approval. An externally visible sign of the common good is, for example, a multi-purpose hall made of wood and reeds in Kirchanschöring. There were always two fundamental questions in the background: “Are we doing the right things?” And: “Are we doing things right?”
Fresh thoughts for the common good
“Citizen participation is one of the most important instruments”, reported Birner and explained how it works: If a larger project is pending in his municipality, a group of around 150 people is randomly written to from the data in his municipality. In all experience, ten percent of those contacted would then agree to get involved in the project. “Then it’s not always the same, usual suspects.” The fact that a single person without children sometimes helps build a kindergarten on this path has not turned out to be a disadvantage, on the contrary, it creates “fresh thoughts”. The great advantage of a certification process is that you have to pause and look at all aspects of municipal trade in peace, reported co-speaker Christine Kugler from the Department for Environment and Climate Protection of the City of Munich.
In the discussion among the mayors and representatives of the municipal committees, the question arose very quickly of how the common good-oriented approach could be reconciled with public procurement law. When Ebersberg Mayor Ulrich Proske asked who to turn to, Birner came up with new information: There is an order advice center in Munich for this purpose. Grafing’s mayor Christian Bauer was also skeptical: “It can only work if the money is there.”
The development cooperation comment on the topic: “Certification: Does that have to be?”
“The entire economic activity serves the common good.” This is actually what the Bavarian constitution says. However, if you look at the “implementing provisions” for public procurement law, for example, it becomes so complicated in individual cases that not even clever experts in town hall administrations can feel safe, but need external help. The municipalities could now be certified by means of a certification that they operate in a particularly sustainable and ecological manner and that they should receive benefits in return.
The only question that arises is: Isn’t a municipality or city already obliged by law to act in accordance with ecological, environmentally and humane aspects? Perhaps, however, a small commune is the right political unit in which the most can be achieved for the future. The own community is manageable, guarantees a certain social control due to its size and yet remains agile and quick to react, unlike big politics, which is often found in abstruse lobbying demands. However, there is concern that certification is a bureaucratic instrument. Because we have more than enough of them, even more than sometimes common sense.
An opinion piece by Michael Seeholzer
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