The mechanism for compensating the housing tax for local authorities, which was intended to maintain their financing despite the abolition of this levy, was partially censored this Thursday by the Constitutional Council. This is a victory particularly for small municipalities in the Alpes-Maritimes.
Indeed, the mechanism for compensating the housing tax for local authorities, which was intended to maintain their financing despite the abolition of this levy, was partially censored.
It is notably the commune of La Trinitรฉ in the Alpes-Maritimes that brought this QPC (priority preliminary ruling on the issue of constitutionality), as the compensation provisions contained in the law of December 29, 2019, which foresaw the progressive elimination of the housing tax, did not allow for full compensation of the resources lost by the communes because the calculation did not take into account the portion going directly to inter-municipal unions with multiple purposes (Sivom).
In its decision, the Constitutional Council ruled that the provisions required the communes that financed their union via a fraction of their housing tax to allocate other resources to it or to increase other local taxes to compensate, unlike communes that did not choose this method of financing.
For the approximately 2,350 communes on whose territory a union product of the housing tax was levied in 2017, the government will draw the consequences of the constitutional judge’s decision by proposing methods to address the compensation.
