Street cleaning

A total of 18,200 properties re-examined

City sends out fee notices for 2018 and 2019 following reorganization of street cleaning services

More than 15,000 notices for street cleaning fees for 2018 and 2019 will be sent out by the City of Wolfsburg to its citizens and businesses in the coming days. Due to a change in the Lower Saxony Street Act, the Wolfsburg City Council had to adopt a new municipal street cleaning ordinance and street cleaning transfer statute on January 1, 2018. The new street cleaning fee statutes issued by Wolfsburg Waste Management and Street Cleaning (WAS) at the same time take account of all the resulting changes.

As a result, the city had to take a new look at a total of around 18,200 properties over the past twelve months. As a result of the legal changes, all streets in the city area had to be reassessed. The now legally required separation of the former standard fee into a separate fee for summer and winter cleaning further increased the expense.

Against this background, the quarterly amounts usually due were not collected last year. These are now budgeted together with the amounts for 2019. The notices for 2018 and 2019 will now be sent to the fee payers. First City Councilor Werner Borcherding and Dr. Herbert Engel, CEO of WAS, now provided information on the details.

The new version of the Lower Saxony Road Act also has drastic consequences for Wolfsburg in the treatment of residential properties in the districts. In the past, street cleaning in these areas was carried out by WAS, especially on through roads and on roads with public transport. Nevertheless, no street cleaning fees were charged. The costs incurred in this respect were borne by the City of Wolfsburg. This is now no longer permissible. Street cleaning charges must now be levied throughout the entire city area according to the actual scope of services and the legally defined cost allocation.

In addition, the recent case law of the Lüneburg Higher Administrative Court (OVG Lüneburg) has now set binding requirements for the front meter scale of the property adjacent to the street with public street cleaning that forms the basis for the assessment of charges. The Lüneburg Higher Administrative Court has now also laid down specific requirements for the assessment of so-called "rear land".

The levying of uniform street cleaning fees for summer and winter cleaning is now also only permissible if unequal treatment of the fee debtors is excluded. Because not all streets are cleaned to the same extent in summer and winter, a uniform fee for all streets is now no longer possible according to the revised scope of services of the WAS based on the requirements of the new municipal street cleaning ordinance. In such cases, current case law requires that separate summer and winter cleaning fees must be set.

The current fee calculation is based on a two-year calculation from January 1, 2018 to December 31, 2019 (Section 7 Street Cleaning Fee Statutes). The collection period is the calendar quarter. Due to the time-consuming recalculation, it was not possible to have new fee notices ready in 2018. These will now be sent to the fee payers at the beginning of January 2019. They contain the determination of the street cleaning fees for the years 2018 and 2019. The four quarterly fees from 2018 will be levied together with the 1st quarterly fee in 2019 on the due date of February 15, 2019.