At the town council meeting last week the town’s treasurer (Stadtkämmerer) , Thorsten Schorr, held what is best described as his budget speech (“Haushaltsrede”) for the coming year. Technically the budget (“Haushalt”) is not actually decided yet and will be discussed by the finance committee in their next sitting so that the council can vote on it in November, but the speech outlined where costs are increasing, where cuts will need to be made, and how the town intends to reduce their deficit by 2018.

The full version of the speech and the draft version of the budget will be available as PDF downloads on the town’s website this week, but obviously in German.

So here is a summary of the main points in English.

The speech started with the first potential saving – the members of the council and the executive will only receive printed copies of the 1060 page budget if they actually request it, otherwise they too will be receiving a PDF version. This should not be a problem, as they have all been issued with iPads, and with other official documents moving to this form as well the investment costs for the iPads will apparently be more than outweighed by the saving in printing costs.

Then came the bad news. [Read more…]