Rural councils angry at funding cut

Just three days later mayors discovered a decree that annulled €300m set aside for 2017 to boost investment and town improvement schemes in rural communes in a bid to cut the government deficit.

Ardèche MP Olivier Dussopt, president of Association des Petites Villes de France, called it “a betrayal” adding that government funding had already been cut and this final move was “too brutal”.

He said it halted communes creating jobs as the funds were used to set up community gyms, schools or to improve roads. Nearly €50m was also aimed at improving local life and 80% of this was aimed at associations.

Just days earlier President Macron had said there would be no “brutal cut in grants and said that while it was ‘logical’ to do so in 2018 he would not do it.

Territorial Cohesion Minister Jacques Mézard said that the cuts impacted only projects that had not been started with prefects choosing where to impose cuts on an item by item basis so as not to ‘penalise’ projects that could make a real difference.

In a joint statement signed by five ministers from Interior Minister Gérard Collomb to Mr Mézard and Public Accounts Minister Gérald Darmanin, the government replied to criticism saying: “The cancelled funds had not yet been called into use by local authorities and matched, for the most part, those frozen by the previous government.

“No project that had been started had been cancelled and the previous government had annulled a similar amount of funding in 2016.”

The ministers added that these funds for local authorities had ballooned from €666m in 2012 to €1.962m in 2017. Even after the cut, which made up just 0.3% of state funding for councils, their investment grants were still at an unprecendented level.

Moselle senator François Grosdidier told Le Figaro that the cuts were particularly hard on small communes which, unlike larger ones, towns that did works year on year, would often only have one major project during a mayor’s mandate or even just one in a decade.

However, work that could be affected are repairs for schools, support for local business and traders and these were seen as meeting both strong local needs and obligations set by the government.