With their angry protests against the intended easing of drinking water protection in the state development program, the municipalities, but also the opposition, apparently gave Prime Minister Markus Söder a good start. This is the only way to explain that Söder not only cleared the corresponding applications of his black-orange government coalition in the state parliament. But also put one on top. According to Söder, there should now also be a water cent in Bavaria, an additional fee on water consumption that conservationists and experts have been demanding for a long time. “The water cent shows how precious our water is,” said Söder in a newspaper interview last week. “He will come, primarily to protect our deep aquifer, which must be a sacred and ironclad water reserve.”
Söder’s announcement is astonishing in that the CSU and FW had just rejected the water cent again during the budget deliberations in the state parliament – with reference to the difficult times for the population and the economy. But that’s how Söder is. If he senses that a debate could be risky for him and his CSU, he always reacts in the same way: he takes the lead in the movement and marches ahead. That was the case in 2019 with the “People’s request for biodiversity – save the bees”, the most successful referendum of all in Bavaria. Söder ultimately did more there than the initiators around the ÖDP politician Agnes Becker had demanded – with his natural forest initiative, for example, which catapulted Bavaria to the top of the federal states in terms of nature conservation in the forests. And that’s how it is now with the water cent. After all, there is a state election on October 8th.
In the Ministry of the Environment, they are somewhat surprised by Söder’s announcement that they had written off the topic for years. The experts there agree that the introduction of the fee in Bavaria is overdue. Environment Minister Thorsten Glauber (FW) has also left no doubt about it since he took office in 2018. “We have to be even more sensitive with our water,” he says. “For me, the water cent was a central building block for the future task of water supply in Bavaria from the very beginning. The water cent is intended to support a secure water supply for the people of Bavaria.” That is also the central function of the water cent: “It is collected primarily to control the precautionary protection of resources,” it says stilted in a relevant report by the nature conservation organization BUND.
The fee is not an invention of Bavaria
The water cent is not a new invention, and certainly not a Bavarian one. 13 out of 16 federal states have already collected it, some for many years. And this applies to everyone who draws water or removes it for their own purposes – not just private consumers, but also farmers, trade and industry of all kinds, energy companies and the like. The relevant regulations are very different. It starts with the fees themselves, ranging from 1.5 cents per cubic meter for drinking water in Saxony to 31 cents for the same amount in Berlin.
It is unclear how high the water cent will be in Bavaria. In the past, Glauber has always said that private consumers “have to reckon with a surcharge of two cappuccinos a year”. That would be five or six euros a year and corresponds pretty much exactly to the amount that Söder mentioned in the interview. The amount would be comparatively modest given an average price of 3.47 euros per cubic meter for drinking water in Bavaria and annual consumption of just under 50 cubic meters per capita. Apparently, it will be significantly more expensive for commercial customers and industry.
Of course, much more decisive than the amount of the fee is whether everyone has to pay it, not just private households, but also farmers, mineral water companies, car washes, the chemical industry and all the other commercial consumers. Or whether there will be exceptions and exemptions. Here, too, the regulations of the countries differ greatly. In Baden-Württemberg, for example, there are special rules for agriculture, in Lower Saxony for hydropower and in Saxony for opencast mining, gravel pits and the extraction of mineral resources.
The way the proceeds from the fee are handled is also very different. In Baden-Württemberg they flow entirely into the water industry, in other countries at least some of them, and in Hamburg they disappear into the state budget. So far, only one thing is certain for Bavaria: Until the water cent is also levied in this country, there should still be a lot of tugging by the individual lobby groups about the details. Especially since the municipalities and the water suppliers are still not at all in agreement as to what they should receive from the fee.