The municipalities initially appealed to the Magdeburg Administrative Court against the 2023 district assessment notices. The appeals were dismissed in judgements dated 27 March 2025.
The administrative court declared the assessments of 15 June 2023 for €13,885,824 (Barleben) and €2,756,377 (Niedere Börde) to be lawful. In its judgements, it found that the district levy rate of 42.1 % had been properly established. When determining the district contribution rate for the 2023 financial year, the district fully complied with the procedural requirements arising from the principle of financial equality and fulfilled both its duty of investigation and its duty of disclosure. The district levy rate also fulfils the substantive legal requirements arising from the principle of financial parity.
The plaintiffs wanted to have this reviewed by the Higher Administrative Court of Saxony-Anhalt. This court has now ruled that there are no doubts as to the correctness of the judgements of the administrative court.
In the opinion of the Higher Administrative Court, the district also complied with the procedural rules and substantive law when determining the 2023 district levy.
In the opinion of the Higher Administrative Court, the Administrative Court correctly determined in its judgements that the district had complied with budgetary law. It correctly defined the financial requirement as the financial resources necessary or required by a body to fulfil its expenditure, about which the budget provides information.
The High Administrative Court and the Administrative Court agree that the budget data on which the district based its decision on the district levy was sufficiently up-to-date and reliable. The plaintiffs can neither be agreed that there was more up-to-date budget data nor that this was not reliable. Even if the data was partly taken from the provisional annual accounts of the municipalities, it was more up-to-date and reliable than the planning data from the previous financial year.
The High Administrative Court also confirmed the view of the Administrative Court that the points system used by the district to assess the financial capacity of the municipalities was not arbitrary as the basis for the weighing decision. The data included was suitable for providing an overview of the financial situation of the municipalities. As the district itself was planning with a considerable deficit, in the opinion of both instances it did not have to carry out any additional consideration of the financial interests of the municipalities.
The draft resolution was also properly prepared by the administration for the members of the district council. Annex 2.1 of the draft resolution contained a summarised presentation of the procedure and the relevant considerations for the proposed levy rate. The other annexes contained the underlying data material that was recognisable to everyone. In the opinion of the Higher Administrative Court, the Administrative Court was right to focus on the annual results and not on the budget figures in connection with the review of the guarantee of the minimum financial resources of the municipalities. This is because it follows from the updating requirement that the actual figures of the annual financial statements must be taken into account in the audit instead of the uncertain forecast figures.
The High Administrative Court was unable to establish the violations of the right to a fair hearing asserted by the plaintiffs. In all other respects, the appeal was also not authorised due to a lack of factual or legal difficulties or fundamental importance of the case. The decisions of the Administrative Court and the Higher Administrative Court are final. This means that it has been legally established that the 2023 district levy was lawfully levied by the Börde district.