Conversion (communal services)

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Conversion is in the municipal services , the adaptation of the local infrastructure to larger changes in the population or population structure .

General

Major changes in the number of inhabitants or their socio- demographic composition (such as the age quotient or the poverty rate ) have an impact on the municipal infrastructure ( public administration , services of general interest such as schools , housing , roads ). Their capacities must always be adapted to major changes if the service quality is to be maintained. Changes in the population result in particular from the barely controllable from one community urbanization , inflow or outflow of the population. For example, if company locations by plant closure or military bases closed, the population decline usually leads to vacancy of residential and commercial properties or barracks . These remain unused and turn into ruins if they are not put to a new use through urban redevelopment , rededication and / or change of use .

Business start-ups are also based on location factors that affect the commercial attractiveness of municipalities. The population increase or decrease in turn affects economic factors ( unemployment , consumption , taxes ) that change economic indicators in communities ( gross domestic product per capita, per capita income ).

causes

Conversions on a larger scale are triggered by military or private-sector measures or by individual decisions of the citizens.

The specialist literature deals primarily with conversion due to military reasons. All causes require significant population movements or changes in the structure of the population , which have consequences in terms of capacity and finances for the local authorities concerned . The local authorities can often not control these changes themselves, so they represent data parameters .

history

Population conversions have always been around. Historically noteworthy is the Immigration to Brazil , which brought 1500 to 1650 approximately 580,000 Portuguese to Brazil, followed by further 600,000 immigrants during the gold rush in Minas Gerais between 1700 and 1760. The Immigration to the United States reached its peak from 1892 to 1924 Between 1850 and 1930 5 million Germans immigrated to the USA, and between 1876 and 1910 around 3 million people left Austria-Hungary for the USA. In the period from 1840 to 1930, 900,000 French Canadians came to the country, mostly settling in New England . In the years 1910 to 1920, over 2 million Italians immigrated. The affected US municipalities faced major conversion problems.

The communal conversion, which can be traced back to military disarmament, emerged in the USA in 1945 when military installations were incorporated into the private sector . A "Committee for economic adjustment" ( English Economic adjustment committee ) investigated the lost through closed military bases previous and newly created by the economic jobs , after 114,000 civilian jobs were lost, but were recreated 119,000.

In Germany, the military-related conversion evidently became necessary for the first time in 1984 as part of the “Regional Conversion West-Palatinate” project with regard to military jobs. Meanwhile, disarmament picked up speed with the INF Treaty of December 1987. In November 1989 the "Bremen Foundation for Armaments Conversion" was founded. The German reunification in October 1990 led to the abandonment of Allied military bases, for example through the withdrawal of Soviet troops by August 1994. This was followed by a Bundeswehr reform (transformation of the Bundeswehr 2002–2009, realignment of the Bundeswehr since 2010). The state government of Brandenburg published on August 25, 1992 "Guidelines for Conversion".

In addition to the military-related conversions, there were always conversions triggered by the private sector. Regional structural change ( hard coal mining in the Ruhr area ) and industrial structural change ( steel crisis , relocation of jobs abroad) have triggered conversions. Examples are the conversion from the Bitterfeld Chemical Combine to the Bitterfeld-Wolfen Chemical Park (1997) or the change in use of an industrial wasteland to the Media Park, completed in 2004 , which consolidated Cologne's position as a media location.

Since 1990, immigration across the Mediterranean into the EU has posed major organizational and financial challenges for many European municipalities, which were considerably exacerbated by the refugee crisis in Europe from 2015 and the refugee crisis in Germany from 2015 . These waves of immigration could have been controlled by transmigration, in contrast to the conversions triggered by military or private business (see federal popular initiative “Against mass immigration” ).

Impact on public budgets

As a result of a population decrease, the municipality loses tax and contribution income in the public budget , although municipal capacities ( fixed costs ) are initially maintained ( cost remanence ). Unemployment increases communal expenditure through transfer payments , while at the same time income declines through falling communal taxes ( trade tax , consumption taxes and sales tax shares ). This opposite trend leads to budget deficits that restrict municipal investments and can lead to investment backlogs. Conversely, the increase in population leads to an improvement in the budget situation, for example due to business start-ups via additional trade tax, sales tax and other income. However, this does not apply to all population increases. The population increase due to largely professionally unqualified refugees increases transfer payments and leads to higher unemployment rates , which are a burden on public budgets.

Conversion tasks

The local government is responsible for reacting to data changes or anticipating expected changes in the context of urban planning . For this purpose, the instruments of personnel planning (for authorities ), urban development , construction planning for affected buildings or fallow land , economic development in the settlement of commercial enterprises or financial subsidies ( grants , public guarantees , training subsidies , restructuring subsidies ), as well as interim uses are available, possibly supported by state industrial policy .

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ cf. representative for many: Peter Eichhorn / Klaus Lenk / Gebhard Zimmermann, Verwaltungslexikon , 2003, p. 595 or Alfred Gettmann, Troop Reduction and Conversion in Germany. Heimstätte Rheinland-Pfalz (Ed.), In: Communications from the State Development Societies: Conversion of areas formerly used by the military, 1992, p. 3
  2. ↑ Olaf Achilles, Military Stress Analysis and Regional Conversion , 1990, p. 140
  3. ^ Defense Office of Economic Adjustment, 1977, p. 55
  4. ↑ Olaf Achilles, Military Stress Analysis and Regional Conversion , 1990, p. 138 f.