"I am very happy about the wage agreement. Over the past ten years or so, my employees, like all employees in the public sector, have constantly had to work in crisis mode. First the refugee crisis, then the coronavirus pandemic, followed by the war in Ukraine and the admission of war refugees - local government employees have earned this pay rise in recognition of their outstanding crisis management. And we now not only have a shortage of skilled workers, but also a shortage of labor in Germany. Good work must therefore also be well paid in order to remain competitive in the public sector.

In addition, many citizens are unsettled and sometimes annoyed by the ongoing crisis that has lasted for years. It is therefore a good thing that there will be no more warning strikes, which of course have a noticeable impact on public services during the strike.

However, the fundamental problem is that local authorities have been structurally underfunded for years. In concrete terms, this means that we are being assigned more and more state tasks by the federal and state governments, but are not receiving adequate funding. This means that the dramatically increasing deficits in local authority budgets are not self-inflicted, but externally determined. As Vice President of the Association of Cities and Towns of Lower Saxony, I therefore continue to call for a reform of the federal-state fiscal equalization system with the aim of providing municipalities with adequate funding for their tasks.

It is good that the federal government, which has just been formed, wants to launch an investment package worth billions to stimulate the economy and improve the infrastructure. It is important to us as local authorities that not only new investments can be initiated, but that investment projects already planned and anchored in local authority budgets can also be implemented. And it is equally important, against the backdrop of the increasing labor shortage in the municipalities and in order to safeguard the functioning of our state, that the federal and state governments decide on a moratorium on tasks. In other words, the order of the day is not to make new election promises that we will not be able to implement on the ground due to a persistent shortage of staff, but to find solutions to the urgent problems currently facing us!"