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The canton of Lucerne will receive three times as much money from the Swiss National Bank (SNB) for 2020 retrospectively as budgeted, namely 192 million francs. The government council wants to use the additional income to alleviate the corona-related deficit.
The additional CHF 128 million will be paid out in the current year, as the Lucerne State Chancellery announced on Friday evening after the SNB’s decision was announced. This had agreed with the Federal Department of Finance (FDF) to support the Confederation and the cantons with up to six billion francs over the next five years, depending on the course of business.
Lucerne’s Finance Director Reto Wyss (CVP) stated in the message that the additional money could help cushion shortfalls and additional expenditure resulting from the corona crisis to a certain extent. As a first step, the funds should therefore be used to deal with the current situation.
All immediate measures to combat the corona crisis in which the canton is involved therefore amount to over 90 million francs. Finance director Wyss wants to budget defensively for the SNB income in the future and points out that the effective distribution depends on the SNB profit. With the “extremely high balance sheet total” of almost one trillion francs, the volatility of the annual results is also increasing.
For the current year the canton had originally budgeted 64 million francs from the SNB, at the beginning of January it was announced that this amount would double. At that time, Wyss said they wanted to use the money to cushion the deficit of 49.8 million francs.
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