The Raanana Municipality has joined the local councils’ battle against government budget cuts.  A one-day warning strike will be held tomorrow,  March 10, 2010.

On that day, municipal services will not be provided and all the municipal institutions will not receive the public or answer telephone calls. Studies at educational institutions will be held as usual.

The local government is engaged in a critical battle over the future of the local authorities. The government of Israel is shirking its responsibility to provide basic services to the residents of the State of Israel,

More and more local authorities are left without the resources that they need to function, they are incapable of providing services to their residents and to pay the salaries of their employees.

Some years ago, the government cut the compulsory payments to the local authorities (the balance grants) by almost half (from a sum equal to approximately NIS 3.9 billion in today’s terms in the year 2000 to approximately NIS 1.8 billion). What this means is the immediate collapse of dozens of local authorities!

The local authorities are coping with a fundamental issue and a government policy that harms all the local authorities and makes them dependent on the government’s favors. We are already forced to use to municipal rate payments in order finance more and more national tasks that are supposed to be covered by income tax revenues, such as financing the water sector, benefits for senior citizens, religious services, education, welfare and more. As if that weren’t enough, the government has conceived a baseless notion of having the municipal rate payments paid by residents in financially robust cities, including Raanana, transferred in order to finance the payments that the government owes to other authorities that lack the basic income needed to provide normal service to their residents.  

Mayor Nahum Hofri: “In a situation where financially robust authorities are forced to use their residents’ municipal rate payments to finance other authorities, the day will soon come when we, too, are liable to find ourselves in difficulties that will harm the provision of services to the residents of Raanana, and we cannot agree to this!   I thank the members of the City Council and the Municipality employees who have joined me in expressing support and identification with the local authorities whose residents are not receiving services.”