This Thursday, April 20, Île-de-France Mobilités (IDFM), the region’s transport regulatory authority, adopted its 2022 administrative account. To simplify, it validated its accounts for the year 2022. An important step for the Ile-de-France organization which gave rise to shared observations.
Because the accounts of the organization chaired by Valérie Pécresse, the president of the region, are redder than ever. Its debt now reaches 8.7 billion euros against “only” 5 billion at the end of the previous year.
Covid-19, inflation and operating budget
However IDFM does not seem to be worried about it since in its balance sheet, the authority boasts of the “good management of Île-de-France Mobilités while the climate of high uncertainties has persisted throughout the year ” . Indeed, according to the report presented, it is “the effects of the health crisis on revenue which are still very significant” and “the advance granted by the State of 1.9 billion euros”, a loan granted by the government after the Covid-19 that IDFM will have to reimburse. Add to that the “emergence of the energy crisis and soaring inflation” since the start of the war in Ukraine, and you have the obvious culprits for the debt explosion.
But the reasons for this indebtedness are not only exogenous. Indeed, contacted by 20 minutes, IDFM has been raising real “operational funding problems” in its activity for several years. In other words, the investment that works with new lines and recent or ongoing extensions is greater than the revenue that makes it possible to finance the operation that follows these investments (energy, wages, etc.).
The opposition raises the specter of a new increase in the Navigo pass
For its part, the opposition highlights the management of Valérie Pécresse, through the voice of Jacques Baudrier, communist administrator at Île-de-France Mobilités, who “continues to incur expenses”, but has stopped “fighting for make revenue”. According to the elected official, since 2016 refuses to charge the “CAC40 companies” of Hauts-de-Seine via the mobility payment and leaving as a solution a new increase in the Navigo pass.
A strategy denied by the management of IDFM this Friday, which ensures that it is working on other financing solutions, including certain advances during the Conference on the financing of Ile-de-France transport last January, such as a tax on real estate capital gains made thanks to the arrival of the metro in certain districts, for example.