Between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, the town hall in the small community of Reichertsheim is closed, as is that of the even smaller neighboring community of Kirchdorf. It’s the same thing, because both places in the Mühldorf district form an administrative community. But people have actually been undisturbed in this town hall for far too long this year. In any case, most of the time nobody seems to have noticed that the Reichertsheim administrative community has, purely formally, made it through 2023 with zero income and zero expenses.
Well, unexpected budget problems happen even at the highest political levels. But if the federal government suddenly lacks 60 billion, there will still be something left over, apart from the sign of some of the sums. But in Reichertsheim all budget items for 2023 were exactly: zero. Which is why the non-administrative community there has collected zero trade tax and at the same time has accumulated a fairly large stack of outstanding invoices.
Someone, who supposedly can no longer be identified, simply took over the budget from the previous year, wrote “2023” over it, set all items to the value zero and ticked the box in the computer for decided, checked and legally set. Managing director Jürgen Seifert explained something similar, according to a report in Mühldorfer Anzeiger all of this recently to the local councilors.
In any case, Seifert himself wasn’t the one who set the box. He was mayor of Prien am Chiemsee from 2008 to 2020 and was not elected district administrator of Ansbach afterwards. He ran for office in response to public job advertisements. Seifert now runs his own consulting company for municipalities – and through which he has been running the business in Reichertsheim since November. The treasurer of the city of Weiden has taken over the treasurer’s office there – also temporarily.
The two of them have now made something that the local council has now retroactively approved as a makeshift budget for 2023. The recipe almost sounds familiar: quickly adopt the long-outdated 2022 budget and simply change the numbers. This time, however, not all of them were set to zero, but were taken over with a ten percent inflation surcharge. The rest should be leveled out later in the annual accounts. However, an additional budget item for consulting services will probably be needed at some point.