From the local council

From full drawers to full dustbins

(Bild: Birbaumer Johanna)

The new Innsbruck City Council does not want to have any legacy issues and has decided not to continue dealing with the outstanding motions from the last period. It is now up to the parliamentary groups to take old motions with them.

What a struggle for majorities it was in the last Innsbruck municipal council. The fact that anything at all could be voted on positively towards the end must have been due to a brief lapse of attention on the part of the divided municipal council. And yet there were initiatives on which agreement could be reached.

Proposals are not pursued further
But the mills of the town hall sometimes grind slowly. In six years, 1131 applications were submitted in the last legislative period up to 2024. In other words: drafted, researched, discussed, defended and finally voted on, some even positively. And then the real work begins for the offices that have to process the applications. As reported, 250 of these are still outstanding. At the municipal council meeting on Thursday, the council voted in favor of no longer pursuing these in principle (only the KPÖ was against). So a lot of work for nothing.

(Bild: Christof Birbaumer, Claus Meinert)

 However, the possibility was granted to nominate individual applications until the July municipal council meeting, which will then be "reassessed". (This is thanks to a change in city law; until recently, only those responsible decided on the old applications, i.e. whether to continue working on them or whether they should be dung bins). This means that all applications that were lucky enough to be processed quickly went through, while all applications that were delayed until the next period have to go before a (different) committee again, even though they have already been approved once.

New committee must decide on applications again
Ne bis in idem" applies in court, meaning that a case may only be decided once if nothing significant has changed. This is obviously not the case in the municipal council, although the main thing that has changed in this case would of course be the municipal council itself. In any case, it leaves a loophole for motions that have already been positively voted on, namely that of being carried over into the next period.

Is there no time horizon at all?
Without wishing to stress anyone out, how can it be that applications apparently do not have to be completed within a certain period of time, not even within the legislative period in which they were received?

The following applies: if an application is still open after one year (!), the mayor must inform the municipal council of the status of the matter. This takes place under the "Notifications" item; the individual applications are not listed separately on the agenda. GR Mesut Onay (ALi) criticized the fact that only headings were read out here, but no information was provided on the status of the matter, not to mention a reason as to why the application had not yet been dealt with. The system in and of itself therefore leaves enough leeway and time for applications to sit comfortably in their drawers for a long time. "A gigantic waste of time, resources and knowledge," complains GR Tom Mayer (Liste Fritz), "Opinions and reports have sometimes been missing for two years! Something has to change, the applications have to be processed faster!" "What do we learn from this? What is the lesson?" asks Onay. The question remains unanswered.