Two socialist mayors from neighboring towns meet for lunch. The first, elected from the smallest of the cities, third and last term, is struggling to make ends meet and has to raise taxes to absorb energy costs. The second, in his early forties but already fifteen years of elected career, talks about the renovation of schools, the future of their working-class neighborhoods. “We will team up to find common solutions”, launches the first, a boutade ». Was it enough to formulate this one for the joke to infuse. A few months later, the idea resurfaced when he once again had to postpone the construction of a kindergarten. The oldest calls his youngest: “Do you remember our discussion?” What do you think about it ? ” ” It’s awesome ! We will propose it to our elected officials. »
This series of exchanges is the version given by Michel Fourcade, the mayor of Pierrefitte-sur-Seine, in Seine-Saint-Denis, to tell the genesis of the project to merge his municipality with that of Saint-Denis, and whose he announcement surprised everyone at the beginning of April. There “new town” would stretch from the north of Paris to the gates of Sarcelles, in the Val-d’Oise, and would become, with some 150,000 inhabitants, the largest municipality in Ile-de-France outside of Paris. On the decisive moment, Mathieu Hanotin, mayor of Saint-Denis, is more evasive. “There is no starting point with a magical idea that suddenly comes out, he assures. It’s a long-standing reflection that I started with Michel Fourcade, with the idea that united, we are stronger. » The two men know each other well. Michel Fourcade was deputy Hanotin in 2012.
Inspiring quip or thoughtful project, it does not prevent: most of the inhabitants learned the news by opening The Parisian, April 5. Fifteen days later, during the municipal councils which formalized the process, the opposition denounced a « 49.3 local ». The researchers hadn’t seen it coming either. The creation of new communes was out of fashion. There was indeed a movement in the mid-2010s, when mayors were looking for a solution to the drastic reduction in state grants, under the presidency of François Hollande, explains Léo Fauconnet, director of the governance mission at the Institute. Paris Region. And when the law evolved to try to reduce, without much success, the number of municipalities in France, as numerous as in the rest of the European Union.
School management
More recently, Evry and Courcouronnes, in Essonne, united in 2019. But after having belonged to the same new town union for fifty years. As for Moret-Loing-et-Orvanne, in Seine-et-Marne, it is rather a story of villages that cluster together in the city center, on the model of Cherbourg in the Channel. Nothing that really resembles the Dionysian scheme. The link between Saint-Denis and Pierrefitte is so obvious that Michel Fourcade first turned to Villetaneuse, its neighbor of 13,000 inhabitants. But the very young various left mayor declined.
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