A majority in Hjørring City Council has removed the most criticized school savings from its new budget deal, while raising the municipal tax to the highest level in the country.
The agreement was presented on Thursday, September 18, and it scraps the plan to gather the oldest pupils from the town schools in a shared upper stage at Muldbjergskolen. According to DR, Mayor Søren Smalbro of Venstre confirmed that the plan will not go ahead. He said the parties behind the deal tried to spare the school system as much as they could.
Earlier in the week, up to 300 parents and children demonstrated outside Muldbjergskolen in protest against the proposed school cuts, DR reports. The mayor was surrounded by pupils during the demonstration on Tuesday.
Several savings remain in place. The elite sports classes and the Psychiatry Team for Children and Young People are being closed, and parent payments for the school after school programs, the SFO, are set to rise, according to DR.
Hjørring Kommune has also been allowed to raise the municipal income tax by 0.09 percentage points without state sanctions. That places the municipality at the highest tax level among Danish municipalities. The increase gives the municipality 12 million kroner in extra revenue from next year.
Social Democrats outside the deal
For the first time in several decades, the Social Democrats are not part of a budget agreement in Hjørring. The party’s group chair in the city council, Mai-Britt Beith, told DR that her party wanted half of the extra tax revenue spent on strengthening the school area further. She said the party disagreed with the other parties on that point.
Smalbro said the parties behind the deal agree that the money should instead strengthen the municipality’s liquidity in the coming years. According to the mayor, there was agreement on raising the tax, but not on how the revenue should be used.
The budget deal is backed by Venstre, the Conservatives, Danmarksdemokraterne, SF and the Danish People’s Party, as reported by TV 2 Nord. The Social Democrats, the Social Liberals, the Red-Green Alliance and Vendelbolisten stand outside the agreement, according to DR.
The agreement covers the years 2027 to 2030. Per a statement from Hjørring Kommune distributed by Ritzau, the municipality must find savings of 155 million kroner by 2030.
The municipality states that the deal also gives the school area a pause from the heaviest changes. Detailed decisions on the remaining savings follow the adoption of the budget.
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