Regulation: faced with normative madness, mayors no longer know what to do

Stéphane Burgatt // Credits: Riccardo Milani / Hans Lucas / Hans Lucas via AFP 8:30 a.m., February 12, 2024

REPORTING

Mayors face normative madness. Faced with piling up regulatory standards, farmers are not the only ones to revolt. According to the association of mayors of France, elected officials must build their construction and development projects with nearly 400,000 standards facing them. A situation deemed more livable by the mayors who are sounding the alarm. Europe 1 went to meet them in Bouches-du-Rhône. 

Among the examples of regulations which block the action of mayors, there is for example a road bypass which was to put an end to the pollution of 15,000 cars, just in front of the Fuveau municipal school. The construction site has been at a standstill for two years following the discovery of a pair of owls on the route. “We had to compensate this couple of owls by giving them more land so that they could go flying, it costs millions of euros. We only work with a technocracy that is suffocating us”, testifies, disappointed, Béatrice Bonfillon , the mayor of Fuveau. 

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“We are being held hostage by the state” 

In Auriol between natural and agricultural flood zones, mayor Véronique Miquelly cannot meet social housing quotas. “I was fined 300,000 euros, which represents a third of the investment budget. We are taken hostage by the State,” she testifies. Many of them are at their wits' end, as the president of the mayors of Provence, George Christiani, describes: "In Bouches-du-Rhône, in the last elections, a third of the mayors did not run. The elected officials are fed up with it. "fuck with this dogmatic way of managing France". 

Faced with the burden of standards, it has become impossible to deal with it without the help of an expert firm that many municipalities cannot afford to pay.