It is not as if Mainz’s finance minister, Günter Beck (The Greens), did not warn in time. Since April at the latest, the treasurer has repeatedly pointed out that the “lightweight times” are now over. Because the Biontech windfall recorded in 2021 and 2022 – trade tax revenues of around two billion euros – also dried up with the end of the corona pandemic.
Beck, who can look back on four decades of local political experience, apparently did not do much more than that. In any case, his own warnings did not prevent him from presenting an unbalanced 2024 budget to the city council for approval shortly before the local elections. As in the previous year, the draft once again showed a hefty deficit, this time of almost 90 million euros.
Sending such unbalanced figures to the responsible supervisory and service directorate can only be seen as a provocation by the supervisory authority in Trier. And so the current reprimand is much harsher than in previous years, in which the Rhineland-Palatinate state capital violated the requirement to draw up a balanced budget with unpleasant regularity. The principle of “close your eyes and get on with it” ultimately led to the municipality accumulating a mountain of debt of 1.2 billion euros in pre-corona times, although this has now largely been paid off.
This is exactly what Beck and the non-partisan mayor Nino Haase never wanted to experience again. But the vague forecasts for 2025 and 2026, which were also criticized by the supervisory authority, give rise to fears of further debt. Because even if all of the Biontech tax money has not yet been spent, the city cannot simply cover running costs by dipping into its savings. Regardless of how much money is still in the bank, Mainz, like all other municipalities, has to bring income and expenditure back into balance every year.
Despite all the justified criticism of the complicated financing and funding regulations of the federal and state governments, which must have been aware since 2023 at the latest that the “miracle of Mainz” was only short-lived, the head of the finance department must first and foremost ensure that the calculations add up. The planned new Kenya coalition (still in the process of being formed) is now paying the price for not having done its job properly before the local elections in the summer.
