Zweckverband (Germany)

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A special purpose association is an intermunicipal cooperation between municipalities and / or municipal associations to fulfill a specified public purpose .

General

In the context of services of general interest , each municipality must, in particular, to secure the own needs of the municipality and its residents , the local trade and industry with public utilities and services , the provision of public infrastructure , the municipal settlement policy with the aim of providing housing for broad layers of the The population, urban development and redevelopment measures , support for economic development , consideration of social concerns of the beneficiaries or the elimination of social and otherwise unacceptable grievances. There is also a public purpose if it does not provide services of general interest; In the social constitutional state , the municipalities can take on numerous and varied public tasks in the public interest , which are covered by the public purpose. It is sufficient that the activity for the public purpose is objectively necessary in the sense of reasonably required. These diverse tasks can overwhelm the financial strength of a single municipality, so that it can join forces with other municipalities for water supply or sewage disposal .

history

For the Prussian Landgemeindeordnung (PLGO) of July 1891, special purpose associations according to §§ 128 ff. PLGO “for the perception of individual communal matters” were intended. The German Municipality Code (DGO) of January 1935 also knew the Zweckverband, but only mentioned it in Section 69 (2) DGO: "The participation of the municipality in a Zweckverband in which only public bodies are involved remains unaffected." The entry into force of the Reich administration union law (RZVG) from June 1939 were for municipal cooperations uniform rules, which also transnational syndicates were permitted.

This centralized legislation of municipal law ended with the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany, so that since then municipal regulations have been based on state law , such as the municipal regulations for the state of North Rhine-Westphalia from October 1952.

Legal issues

The Zweckverband is a public-law amalgamation of several local authorities for the joint fulfillment of a certain task, which takes place either in the form of a public-law contract or by law . According to the law on communal community work in North Rhine-Westphalia , the communes can join together to form special-purpose associations in order to carry out individual or several related communal tasks. In contrast to the communal working group and the public law agreement, the Zweckverband has its own legal personality in the form of a corporation under public law and manages the matters assigned to it within the framework of the laws and its statutes ( association statutes ) on its own responsibility. As a result of the transfer of municipal tasks to the Zweckverband, the municipalities are prohibited from performing these tasks on their own.

In Brandenburg , the state law regulates that the Zweckverband is not a community association, but that the corresponding regulations apply to it. In North Rhine-Westphalia, on the other hand, the Zweckverband is put on an equal footing with the municipal association (Section 5 (2) of the Law on Communal Community Work). Its corporate status requires a statute (Zweckverbandssatzung), compulsory membership ( member municipalities ), the formation of the organs ( Zweckverband organs ) and the regulation of its finances , such as the allocation regulation .

The Zweckverband represents the most common form of intermunicipal cooperation. It is uniformly defined in EU law as the “ LAU level ” ( English local administrative unit ).

Statutes and organs

In the association's statutes, the members, the tasks and the name as well as the type of financing are specified. The latter takes place depending on the task by generating own income, e.g. B. Fees , through allocations or through an association levy (to be paid proportionally by the members). The organs of the special purpose association are regularly the special purpose association assembly and the association chairperson (e.g. North Rhine-Westphalia, Brandenburg and MV), in individual federal states also the association manager (e.g. Lower Saxony or Saxony-Anhalt). The special purpose association assembly consists of delegates from the members. Since every member municipality sends delegates to the special-purpose association assembly, the number of seats is often not sufficient to represent the smaller parliamentary groups. In addition, special purpose associations usually meet in public.

In addition to the municipal corporations, members of the associations can also be the federal government, the federal states or other corporations , institutions and foundations under public law , unless the special regulations that apply to them exclude or limit participation. Likewise, natural persons and legal persons under private law can be members of a special purpose association if the fulfillment of the association's tasks is promoted and reasons of public welfare do not conflict. There are several thousand special purpose associations in Germany. This form of organization is currently experiencing a renaissance, not least for economic reasons.

species

The amalgamation of at least two municipalities to form a special purpose association can take place in two different forms:

  • On the basis of a voluntary public law contract between municipalities, it is referred to as a "free association" (§ 5 I HessKGG) or
  • in the case of compulsory membership due to a regulatory order or state law (Section 1 (2) Law on Community Community Work in North Rhine-Westphalia; so-called “statutory purpose association” or “mandatory association”).

Verbandsgemeinden are regional authorities in Brandenburg , Rhineland-Palatinate and Saxony-Anhalt , which consist of several legally independent communities. It is an administrative community of several independent municipalities, which form a new regional authority as a collective municipality to handle their administrative business.

A “ Broadband Supply Association ” is responsible for the establishment, expansion and operation of fiber optic networks for Internet supply.

economic aspects

Not every small community has to afford its own waterworks , for example , but can join forces with neighboring communities to build and operate a joint waterworks or other large-scale systems . In this way, the financing risk and the financial risk of the investment are distributed over several municipalities and at the same time the number of customers for the waterworks increases. This combined effect ensures the use of synergies and creates cost advantages for the communities and citizens. In this way, waste water associations , local public transport , school associations , tourism associations such as the Berchtesgaden-Königssee tourism region , transport associations , traffic monitoring , water associations or the association for rescue services and fire brigade alarms are created .

Special-purpose association savings banks

Support a public savings bank is usually the municipality in which the Sparkasse their place of business has. Mergers between savings banks are only possible if the sponsoring communities set up a special-purpose association which only has the task of uniting at least two savings banks. This creates special-purpose savings banks. Examples are the two large Cologne savings banks Sparkasse KölnBonn and Kreissparkasse Köln . Sparkasse KölnBonn was created on January 1st, 2005 through the merger of Stadtsparkasse Köln with Sparkasse Bonn . The legal merger was technically completed on June 5, 2006 with the merging of customer and product data from the two predecessor institutes. The Kreissparkasse Köln is not a Kreissparkasse because there is no longer a district of Cologne since the Cologne Act , but a Zweckverbandssparkasse, whose first merger took place in January 1923. To establish it, the Rhein-Erft-Kreis , the Rhein-Sieg-Kreis , the Rheinisch-Bergische Kreis and the Oberbergische Kreis have come together to form a special purpose association that supports the Sparkasse.

Demarcation

Legally, a special purpose association is to be distinguished from a water and soil association . The Zweckverband z. B. in Bavaria by the joint municipal company , which is an institution under public law. The membership of a municipality in a special purpose association, combined with the transfer of one or more tasks, is free of procurement law within the framework of so-called intermunicipal cooperation, so it does not require a prior procurement procedure .

International

In other countries, too, there are municipal cooperations whose structure and tasks are comparable with special-purpose associations. In Austria this is called a community association , in Luxembourg a syndicate . In the USA , the special-purpose district is very similar to the Zweckverband.

literature

  • Janbernd Oebbecke : formation of special purpose associations and guarantee of self-administration . Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1982.
  • Peter Seydel: The municipal special purpose associations . 1955.
  • Thorsten Ingo Schmidt: Municipal cooperation . 2005, ISBN 3-16-148749-4 .
  • Turgut Pencereci: Law on communal community work in Brandenburg . Kommunal- und Schul-Verlag (loose-leaf edition), Wiesbaden 2010, ISBN 978-3-86115-125-8 .
  • Jens Wassermann: The Hanover region - regional cooperation against the background of an institutionalized local authority . VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, Saarbrücken 2007, ISBN 978-3-8364-5577-0 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ BVerwGE, 39, 329 , 333
  2. ^ Higher Administrative Court of North Rhine-Westphalia , decision of August 13, 2003, OVGE 49, 192 ff. = NVwZ 2003, 1520
  3. ↑ badische-zeitung.de , from December 16, 2016, Daniel Gramespacher: Landkreis Lörrach: Expansion of fast internet is making progress (December 17, 2016)