Municipalities don’t need trash powers

The Constitutional Court (CC) will consider complaints from the leadership of two municipalities, who are forced to liquidate ownerless landfills at their own expense, although this is beyond their powers. Municipalities also appeal to the new provisions of the Constitution on the unity of public authority, which presuppose the coordinated action of its various levels as a whole for the benefit of citizens.

The Constitutional Court, according to a report on its website, accepted for consideration the complaints of the authorities of the city of Kodinsk (Krasnoyarsk Territory) and the Novosibirsk region of the Novosibirsk region. They dispute the norms of a number of laws (including “On the Enactment of the Land Code”, “On the General Principles of Organization of Local Self-Government (LSA)” and “On Production Wastes”), but their claims boil down, in essence, to one thing: municipalities assigned responsibility for the elimination of ownerless landfills in the absence of appropriate funding.

In 2015, the Constitutional Court dealt with ownerless dumps and pointed out that the municipality cannot be responsible for the elimination of such dumps in the forests, since they fall under the responsibility of a higher, regional level of government. But this time we are talking about landfills in areas, the state property in respect of which has not yet been delimited. The Leninsky District Court of Novosibirsk decided in 2020 that the municipality should be responsible for the landfill, as it arose “due to the administration’s improper performance of its duties related to the use of the land” and “failure to take measures to clean up the territory.” In the same year, the Arbitration Court of the Krasnoyarsk Territory recovered from the administration of Kodinsk in favor of the local MSW operator 334 thousand rubles spent on the elimination of an unauthorized dump. The court referred, among other things, to the law on the enactment of the Land Code, from which it follows that since local authorities are responsible for the distribution of land located on their territory, they must be responsible for their maintenance, even if the owner of the site is not determined.

The applicants categorically disagree with this approach. They refer to the fact that the law on local self-government and the Budget Code directly prohibit municipalities from participating in the exercise of state powers and resolving issues that fall within the competence of state authorities at the expense of local budgets. Meanwhile, the development and protection of land belong to the powers of the federation, and the issues of ownership and use of land are under the joint jurisdiction of the Russian Federation and the subjects, the applicants recall.

Land plots, the ownership of which is not demarcated, are state property, the administration of Kodinsk insists in its complaint. Now, neither the grounds nor the conditions for maintaining such sites have been determined – this is a gap in the legislation that should not be filled at the expense of the forces and means of municipalities. Nevertheless, for the time being, local authorities continue to be entrusted with powers that are not attributed by the legislator to issues of local importance and are not provided with funding. This contradicts the constitutional principle of LSG independence and violates the principle of the unity of public authority, the applicants insist. They recall that the Constitutional Court, having approved amendments to the Constitution in 2020, explained this principle as a coordinated action of various levels of public authority. The implementation of powers to maintain land plots should be a comprehensive work of all levels of the public authority system as a whole for the benefit of citizens, the complaint emphasizes. Therefore, the petitioners ask that the controversial provisions be recognized as unconstitutional to the extent that they allow municipalities to be held responsible for powers they do not have.

Director of the Research Center for Territorial Changes and Urban Development of the Institute for Applied Economic Research of the RANEPA Andrey Maksimov admits that this is the first time he hears that an appeal to the principle of unity of public authority is used as an argument in the Constitutional Court. Although this has its own logic, the expert notes: the differentiation of competencies is becoming more and more complex and increasingly depends on the characteristics of the territories, including their financial capabilities. At the same time, Mr. Maksimov adds, undelimited land has always been regarded as state land, and the powers of municipalities are enshrined in a closed list of issues of local importance.

From the point of view of the logic of the law, the region must either restore order in the territory under its jurisdiction, or transfer powers to the municipality along with funding, says Marina Bespalova, ex-representative of the State Duma in the Constitutional Court. On the other hand, according to experts, more than 200 powers remain undelimited, and in some situations this can become a source of uncertainty, the expert concludes.

Anastasia Kornya