Metropolitan Area Act

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Scope of the BallrG. The area of ​​the resolved UVF is shown darker.

The Hessian "law to strengthen local cooperation in the greater Frankfurt / Rhine-Main" ( metropolitan law , BallrG) of 19 December 2000 ( GVBl. I, p 542) The basis of inter-municipal cooperation in the vicinity of Frankfurt am Main . It came into force on April 1, 2001. On April 1, 2011, its regulatory content was incorporated into the “Law on the Frankfurt / Rhine-Main Metropolitan Region (MetropolG)” of March 8, 2011 (GVBl. I p. 153).

Basic data
Title: Law to strengthen communal cooperation in the Frankfurt / Rhine-Main conurbation
Short title: Rhine-Main conurbation law
Abbreviation: BallrG
Type: State Law
Scope: Hesse
Legal matter: Administrative law , local law
References : GVBl. II 330-45 a. F.
Issued on: December 19, 2000
( GVBl. I p. 542)
Entry into force on: April 1, 2001
Last change by: Art. 1 AA of February 2, 2006
(GVBl. I p. 10)
Effective date of the
last change: 		February 9, 2006
(Art. 4 Amendment Act of February 2, 2006)
Expiry: April 1, 2011
(§§ 23 No. 1, 24 G of March 8, 2011,
GVBl. I p. 153, 159)
Please note the note on the applicable legal version.

The Metropolitan Area Act consists of three parts:

  • the actual conurbation law, which regulates the tasks to be solved jointly, the establishment of voluntary cooperation and the establishment of a "council of the region",
  • the "Law on the Planning Association for the Frankfurt / Rhein-Main Urban Area" (PlanvG), which establishes this association, and
  • the “Law on the Dissolution of the Frankfurt Umlandverband”, which dissolves the “ Umlandverband Frankfurt ” (UVF) multi-purpose mandatory association founded in 1975 .

scope

The conurbation law applies to 75 Hessian municipalities in the so-called “conurbation”. This is defined in § 2. It includes:

This “agglomeration” does not coincide with the usual delimitations of the Rhine-Main area or the Frankfurt metropolitan area , but combines urban, suburban and rural communities, while the other Hessian centers of the Rhine-Main region ( Wiesbaden and Darmstadt ) are left out. The core cities of Mainz and Aschaffenburg , which are outside of the state borders, escape the validity of Hessian laws anyway. In particular, the communities in the northern third of the “metropolitan area” have little relation to the core city and are more rural than metropolitan areas.

Dissolution of the surrounding association

The Frankfurt Umlandverband (UVF) was the first serious attempt by the Hessian state government to give the divided municipalities in the city region a joint regional organization. It was triggered by the very specific discussion about the formation of a regional city of Frankfurt , which was held in the early 1970s, but was rejected by the state government and representatives of the surrounding area. The multi-purpose compulsory association was a compromise between the previous state and the proposed regional city . He had a directly elected regional parliament. The association had planning, sponsorship and implementation tasks. He created a common land use plan for his 43 member communities. The statutory sponsorship tasks were not issued by the municipalities, the state government remained inactive, and the same thing happened with the coordination tasks. During its existence, the UVF was an unpopular compromise and a "disruptive" competitor for communal competencies; the demand for its dissolution became louder, especially in the 1990s. The metropolitan area law meets this requirement. The formation of voluntary associations was prescribed.

Voluntary cooperation

The metropolitan area law stipulates (§ 1) that voluntary associations are to be formed in the previous areas of responsibility of the UVF. This concerns the areas of waste , drinking water and sewage, location marketing / economic development , regional parks, regional transport planning and the sponsorship of sports, leisure and cultural facilities of supra- local importance. The municipalities have to agree on the organizational form, spatial and content-related layout, financing and the sharing of benefits and burdens (§ 3). If these associations are not formed, the state government can declare a certain field of activity to be “urgent” (Section 6, Paragraph 1) and, after a further year, merge municipalities into a compulsory association by ordinance . However, an objection can be lodged against this ordinance, which can delay implementation by up to 14 months (Section 6 (2)).

Council of the Region

According to Sections 4-5 BallrG, a “Council of the Region” is formed, which includes representatives from the districts and large cities (over 50,000 inhabitants). This council has the tasks

  • Define "principles" for the implementation of the jointly performed tasks
  • Carry out communal conferences and evaluate their results
  • To prepare an "annual report on the status of communal cooperation"
  • To develop measures for a “common image of the region”
  • To involve municipalities outside the metropolitan area defined in § 2.

The law does not make any statements about the binding nature of the council resolutions for the member communities.

Planning association

The PlanvG regulates the formation of a planning association as the legal successor to the UVF. This has (§ 2 PlanvG) the task of creating a regional land use plan and a landscape plan. He can also participate in the tasks to be solved through voluntary cooperation and, in continuation of the activities of the UVF, did this so extensively that the state government legally limited this right of participation in 2006 to an "advisory" one. The planning association also functions as a kind of continuation of the disbanded surrounding area through the personnel continuity of the office. This makes him the most important regional player in the Frankfurt area, and his importance as a contact person and “carer” goes beyond his narrowly limited legal mandate.

Political background

The former regional association was established by law in 1975 by a social-liberal state government. The CDU, as the opposition party at the time , was therefore one of the greatest critics of this institution from the start, even if it held the majority in the association's parliament in the 1990s and provided the association's director . The abolition of the UVF was also an important demand of many CDU-led municipalities, who believed their right to local self-government was impaired by its existence and intermunicipal competencies . After the CDU / FDP- led state government took office under Roland Koch in 1998, the dissolution of the association was one of the first projects of the new state government.

However, the surrounding association was also controversial in the other parties. In 1996 a working group of the SPD under the former state development minister Jörg Jordan published a concept called the Rhein-Main regional district, which proposed the merger of the districts in the region into one large local authority . After the loss of government responsibility, the SPD and the Greens adopted the regional district concept in their party programs. The metropolitan area law of the CDU and FDP is therefore to be seen as an alternative to the (older) regional district concept. Today's opposition parties reject the metropolitan area law just as decidedly as the CDU did the surrounding area.

The CDU in Frankfurt am Main and its Lord Mayor Petra Roth are also among the opponents of the metropolitan area law, they are pursuing their own proposed solution for the city-surrounding area in the Frankfurt area under the name Stadtkreis Frankfurt .

The law was originally limited to five years and was extended for another five years in 2006.

Resistance to the Law

On the initiative of the city of Karben, 21 municipalities and three rural districts filed a lawsuit against the metropolitan area law, which interferes with their right to local self-government to an inadmissible extent. The Hessian State Court dismissed this complaint on May 4, 2004. The court found that the law needed to be specified in order to be enforceable at all and then also legally open to challenge. The plaintiffs' attorney then described the law as “a form of unsolute legislation”, while Interior Minister Volker Bouffier recognized a “success across the board” for the law.

The validity of the law, which was originally limited to March 31, 2006, was extended by the Hessian state parliament on January 26, 2006 to December 31, 2011;

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