Somewhere across the city spectrum of Germany over the past month or two....expenditures of city funding for refugee requirements have finally gotten the attention of money managers and leadership. It's to the point, that Berlin has agreed to host a special emergency meeting.....with 300 mayors, district administrators, and political folks.
The chief item of discussion.....how to funnel funding faster to the cities and pay them what they've spent.
Presently, Sigmar Gabriel (the Vice-Chancellor and big-wig of the SPD Party) has been fairly enthusiastic about this meeting and getting some results.
The general comment spoken by some journalists today is that in 2015.....some cities have already spent a fair amount of money and they need 'replacement funding' now. This idea.....isn't exactly supported by most politicians. I suspect that it'd put the budget for the remaining weeks of the year into a tight fix, with a lot of borrowing.
Generally, there's a feeling by some that there was this Berlin attitude about this having no cost on anyone. The job of handling the crisis....was dumped mostly onto state governments. None of the states stood up and said it ought to be a centralized situation and one German agency running it with buckets of funding from their own pot. It's almost like going back to the early 1800s when it was 300 separate cities, individual countries, or kingdoms in existence and just pretending there is no German national state.
So the gain of this 300-visitor episode to Berlin? Pictures taken with the big guys.....lots of chat.....and a chance to voice complaints. Otherwise? Nothing. Just a free trip to Berlin.
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