The cost recovery principle of the public administration describes a simple principle: The fees demanded by the citizens or companies should cover the costs of the respective offer or the specific service.
Not more but also not less.
Deviating from this principle is more the rule than the exception in town halls and district offices.
After all, the cemetery fees should remain affordable, as should the entry to the public swimming pool and the bus ride.
There is no question that people's bins have to be emptied regularly.
The costs for collection and disposal at the landfill or in the garbage furnace are passed on to the households.
But the transparency of the fee calculation is not far off.
For this reason, the sometimes considerable differences in fees between individual cities and districts in Germany are difficult or impossible to explain.
Worth at least one reprimand
It comes as no surprise that it is getting more expensive in the Rheingau-Taunus after the financial reserves that were much too high for a long time were finally consumed by subsidized fees and after the award of the waste transport was re-tendered. The drastic amount of the new fees does, however. Because the amount of waste in the district is largely stable, the landfill costs rise only insignificantly, and the proceeds from waste paper are considerable. So where did this exorbitant increase come from? The fact that the traditionally politically occupied management of the waste management company does not consider it necessary to explain the reasons in detail to the local politicians who were elected in March in the draft of the new fee statute should be worth at least one rebuke to the district council.
The foreseeable fee shock should only be explained to the public in more detail when the decisions have already been made and nothing can be changed anyway. So it is high time that politicians demand more publicly visible transparency from their own operations. If there is a lively debate in the district council about additional staff for the health department, but the growing personnel costs of in-house operation are not an object of public debate, then something goes wrong.
For a long time, the district politicians paid little attention to waste disposal, because the fees for the citizens were low and the financial situation of the own operation seemed unproblematic.
The fact that former mayors with good political connections have always been at the forefront of the company's own business and thus improve their pension has contributed to this "pacification" of waste policy.
It is high time that these times change again.