An intense battle for jobs and loans: Parliament is trying to save money

Around 50 motions from the Wiler city parliament were up for debate. The city’s budget was extremely controversial.

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“The quality of the budget for 2021 is rather mixed, partly insufficient.” This sentence by Luc Kauf, President of the Business Audit Commission, at the beginning of the debate indicated early on in which direction the session of the city parliament would develop.

The SVP even wanted to reject the budget completely. This gives the newly elected city council the opportunity to help shape the budget itself, said parliamentary group president Benjamin Büsser.

The SVP was alone with this issue. Only one parliamentarian from another party voted for this motion, which was clearly rejected.

Commoners want to cut spending

The fronts along which the budget was then discussed were quickly clarified. On one side stood the bourgeois parties of the city parliament.

They called for various cuts on the expenditure side, for example in the creation of new jobs, and a prioritization of investments. Adrian Bachmann (FDP) said that the budget had not sparked any enthusiasm in the FDP.

“We are missing signals that the city council is doing all it can to counter the large deficit.”

The group would therefore support a large part of the deletion requests.

Something similar was heard from the CVP. Roman Rutz said the parliamentary group also missed the will to save. The CVP will therefore support some of the deletion requests. But Rutz doubted whether that would be enough to get the finances out of the red again. So he thought out loud about a tax hike.

City council tries to show the importance of investments

On the other side stood the city council and the council left. The city council tried to show that the jobs and investments applied for had their justification. Daniel Meili, mayor ad interim, said:

“In this difficult situation, we do not want to lapse into either spending frenzy or hysteria.”

Equity is stable enough to survive the storm.

The city council received support from the SP and the Greens Prowil. Mark Zahner said the SP could not understand the majority of the applications. “Exaggerated austerity measures will not help the city.” A total of around 50 applications were up for discussion. As expected, the meeting therefore ended after the editorial deadline.

The detailed coverage of the debate can be found later today at www.wilerzeitung.ch