Tragicomic Reasons for the Fall of Decisions by the City Fathers of Karlovac

The High Administrative Court of the Republic of Croatia (VUSRH) annulled the Decision on Approving the Implementation of the Public Procurement Procedure for the Municipal Line Transport of Passengers, which was voted on by the City Council of Karlovac. Shortly before that, the same court also annulled the decision of the Mayor of Karlovac regarding the realization of the right to compensation for the equipment of newborn children in 2023.

It is not the first time that VUSRH has annulled an act of local self-government, and in the aforementioned two cases, I was intrigued only by the mention of Karlovac. Until now, when we wrote about similar cases, they were mostly small impoverished municipalities for which it is questionable whether they have the staff – lawyers who will alert the city fathers to violations of regulations, but I expected that a larger community like Karlovac should not allow itself this. However, as we recently had the opportunity to see in the case of the Split city administration, due to stupidity, decisions of larger local communities that are not necessarily bad also fall.

Subsequently Included Incorrect Law

In the first case of the Karlovac authorities, the plaintiff believes that the City Council decided to conduct a public procurement procedure for passenger transport, referring to the provisions of Articles 34 and 97 of the city statute, but without an appropriate legal basis, that is, not referring to the relevant laws.

Moreover, the plaintiff states, the contested decision was published, but with a modified text compared to the voted one, in such a way that Article 35 of the Law on Local and Regional Self-Government (ZoLP(R)S) was nevertheless cited as the legal basis in the preamble of the Decision. Thus, the city fathers subsequently realized that the Decision was not in accordance with some of the relevant laws for that matter, so they included it in the text instead of formally returning it to the Council for re-decision, which would have avoided its possible contestation.

The city administration claimed that the contested decision is an individual act of business, not a general act, and that the Statute of the City of Karlovac was cited as the regulation on jurisdiction in the introduction of the proposal for the decision, and in addition, laws can also be cited, the Law on Local and Regional Self-Government, the Law on Public Procurement, but this is not, as they emphasize in the Administration, necessarily so, and they maintain that there are no prerequisites for initiating an objective administrative dispute.

However, VUSRH believes that the plaintiff (whose initials are not mentioned in the ruling) is right. First of all, the mentioned decision has the character of a general act because the issuer regulates the manner of performing the public utility service of passenger transport in its area, which is clear even to those who follow the judiciary at all. The court also states that the contested decision could not have been made based on the provision of Article 35 of ZoLP(R)S even if we accept that it was included in the text of the Decision after the City Council adopted the text without that article.

Namely, Article 35 grants the representative body of the unit of local and regional self-government the authority to adopt general acts, and indeed the article mentions the right to make decisions, but as the court concludes, the cited provision is of a general nature and cannot be an independent basis for making the contested decision, without the appropriate relevant material law, that is, without the relevant regulations that more closely describe the rules of the game, for example, the Law on Public Procurement or the Law on Road Transport. The same applies to the provisions of Articles 34 and 97 of the Statute.

Every Time I Am Amazed

In light of the above, starting from the fact that the provisions of ZoLP(R)S and the Statute on the basis of which the contested decision was made are not a valid basis for the decision of the City Council of Karlovac, the court assessed that it was made unlawfully.

Thus, every time I am amazed at how such benign oversights can cause so much damage. It is not only about the service intended for citizens, but also entrepreneurs (in this case, transporters) suffer due to the annulment of such a decision because they lose time until everything returns to legal frameworks. I hope that the City Council of Karlovac will not delay in repeating the procedure as it should, to the satisfaction of citizens and entrepreneurs.

POST SCRIPTUM

I mentioned in the main text another decision related to the City of Karlovac, this time the mayor’s. Thus, it is about the Decision on the Realization of the Right to Compensation for the Equipment of Newborn Children in 2023, which was also annulled by VUSRH. The reason is similar. The court concluded that for such a decision, according to the regulations, the mayor is not competent, but the local representative body, that is, the City Council of Karlovac. And no matter how humane it was, the Decision fell due to stupidity, and as a result, parents of newborns suffer.