Only the mayor or chairperson has to stay in the town hall, the rest of the municipal council can theoretically connect via the screen at home – if the members want it and provided that a majority decides this option beforehand. At the beginning of the new year, city and municipal councils as well as district and district councils are reliably given the opportunity to hold hybrid conferences.
As the Ministry of the Interior announced on Wednesday when asked by the SZ, the state parliament has initiated the legal basis for this. It follows an experimental phase that gave municipalities the tools to deal with the Corona crisis; however, this authorization was only limited to the end of 2022. However, as the ministry emphasized when it was introduced in 2021, the trial run should “give more room for maneuver” regardless of the pandemic. For example, for the compatibility of municipal honorary posts with family and work.
The municipalities are free to decide “whether and for which cases they want to allow hybrid meetings,” according to the ministry. However, cities, municipalities and counties that have not previously limited hybrid meetings to pandemic or illness-related absences reported “more flexibility”. This creates a “building block that can lead to making municipal honorary posts more attractive for women in the future”.
Again and again one hears in local politics that mothers in particular do not want to run for office at all, since face-to-face meetings in the evening cannot be reconciled with family life. The local elections two years ago resulted in only slight increases in the proportion of women: for example, in councils of towns and communities belonging to a district, it is now 22 percent.
Only 6.4 percent of the communities last held hybrid meetings
So far, surprisingly few municipalities had actually used the test phase. This was shown in a report to the state parliament’s interior committee in October. According to this, 52 percent of all urban districts met – sometimes even regularly – in the last hybrid; but only 21 percent of the districts, 17 percent of the large district towns and only 6.4 percent of the municipalities belonging to the district. Data protection, a sluggish debate culture without direct exchange and financial worries about the technology to be purchased – such reasons were often given by hesitant municipalities.
According to the Bavarian Municipal Council, some councils may have been reluctant to buy cameras and microphones because there was no permanent regulation. Without a legal basis, the investment would have been in vain. According to the evaluation, other municipalities wanted to go even further, the districts of Traunstein and Nürnberger Land suggested purely digital meetings. The ministry had concerns here: This means “that every member of a municipal committee must inevitably connect digitally, including members who prefer to participate in person”.
The path of the new regulation in the state parliament seems strange. The opposition complained in October that the project could not be decided before the beginning of the year. Municipal bodies that already meet hybrid would have lacked the basis for this in January. Now the government factions CSU and Free Voters have added the hybrid meetings as an amendment to the new rescue service law, which is already well advanced.
There is therefore no separate first reading in the state parliament, the second in early December will naturally primarily be about the rescue service. A procedure that, according to the Ministry of the Interior, is “not unusual” and uses a “time advantage”. Johannes Becher (Greens) finds the “piggyback” legislation with such different topics “a little weird”, and one could have addressed further ideas for strengthening municipal volunteering in the formal way. On the other hand, this is just the chance to get planning security for the municipalities. But also, says Becher, “the state government’s admission that it was much too late here.”