Support for Local Governments

Rationale

This is the largest single line in the chapter. It funds the public-education tasks that remain with municipalities after the 2013 transfer of school operation to the central `Klebelsberg` maintenance system — principally kindergarten (`óvoda`) provision, which stayed municipal, plus ancillary education tasks. Education of children is a function the framework treats as a genuine public responsibility where the child's interest is involuntary — a five-year-old does not choose their schooling. The line is classified Keep on that basis. But Keep does not preclude a structural observation. Hungary already runs, within its own borders, a demonstration that publicly-funded schooling does not require a centralised single-employer model: church-maintained schools (Catholic, Reformed, Lutheran, Jewish) receive per-pupil state grants comparable to state-school funding, follow the same national curriculum, and govern hiring and ethos denominationally — covering approximately 15–17% of primary pupils by the early 2020s. The mechanism that matters is per-pupil funding following the child to a school the parent chooses, with the provider — municipal, denominational, or independent — competing on outcomes. The reform direction for this line is to move from task-grant-to-the-operator toward funding-follows-the-pupil; the envelope stays, the conditioning changes.

Rationale

This is the general-purpose operating grant — the block that funds municipal administration, the statutory minimum of local self-government. Local self-government, including a funded municipal tier, is established by the Fundamental Law (Article 31–35) and is a constitutional precondition of the kind the framework recognises: the institutional machinery through which a defined community makes binding collective decisions about itself. The grant itself is not the object of the classical-liberal critique. The object of the critique is that it is a *grant* at all rather than locally-raised revenue. A municipality funded by a central formula faces the allocator, not its own ratepayers; the feedback loop that disciplines local spending — residents who pay the local tax and can see what it buys — is broken when the money arrives from Budapest. The defensible reform is not to cut the operating function but to restore the local revenue base (a genuine local PIT surcharge or a retained property-tax share) so that the grant shrinks as own-revenue grows. Until that structural reform is enacted, an outright cut would simply strand statutory obligations the municipalities cannot fund. The honest interim classification is a nominal freeze: hold the line, let real-terms erosion at 2–3% inflation apply gentle pressure, and treat the restoration of local fiscal autonomy as the substantive reform.

Rationale

Funds the social-care and child-protection tasks delegated to municipalities — child-welfare services, family support, residential and home care for vulnerable groups. Child protection in particular is a protective response to involuntary harm against identifiable individuals who have no voluntary alternative; that places it inside the rights-protection core the framework keeps. The line is retained. The same per-recipient funding-follows-the-person logic noted for education applies as a long-horizon efficiency reform — care funded per assessed need, portable across municipal, charitable, and church providers — but that is an operating-model reform, not a phase-out, and it does not change the classification.

Rationale

Funds subsidised and free meals for children in kindergartens and schools. The line concentrates on a defined vulnerable group — children, with the deepest subsidy directed at low-income and large families — and the involuntary-interest test applies as it does for child welfare: a child cannot contract for their own nutrition. Retained. The seen beneficiary is the fed child and the family relieved of the meal cost; the unseen cost-bearer is every taxpaying household, including lower-income working households whose own children may not qualify for the deepest subsidy tier. Where the subsidy is means-tested and concentrated on genuine need, that transfer is defensible on the involuntary-harm test. Where free provision extends up the income distribution to households that could fund the meal themselves, the line is funding a transfer rather than protecting a child from harm. The reform is to tighten the means-test gradient, not to cut the function — hence Keep, with a targeting review.

Rationale

Funds the statutory salary and expense reimbursement of mayors, principally in smaller municipalities whose own revenue cannot cover it. The mayor is the elected executive of a constitutionally-established self-governing tier; funding the office is funding the machinery of local democratic decision-making, which the framework recognises as a constitutional precondition rather than discretionary spending. Retained. The same structural caveat as Cím 1.1 applies — in a restored local-revenue architecture the office would be funded locally — but the function itself is core.

Rationale

Funds a wage supplement for staff in municipally-delivered social-care and health-care services. It is a personnel-cost component of the social-care task grant (Cím 1.3), not a free-standing programme; it supplements the pay of workers delivering services already classified Keep on the involuntary-harm test. Classified Keep on the same basis. As with the education supplement, the per-recipient portable-funding reform would absorb this into the care-funding entitlement rather than carry it as a separate supplement, but that is reorganisation, not phase-out.

Rationale

Funds municipal cultural tasks — local cultural centres, community programming, municipal cultural institutions not separately funded under Cím 2.4. Culture is the paradigm of subjective valuation: there is no market price signal and no external aggregator that tells the allocator the optimal level or mix of community cultural programming. What a community values in culture is revealed only through what its members are willing to pay for, attend, donate to, or volunteer for. A central or municipal grant substitutes the allocator's judgement for that revealed preference. This is not a rights-protection function, not a constitutional precondition, and not a response to involuntary harm; it is discretionary allocation of resources to cultural activity by political officeholders. The honest classification is a phase-out. The protected party is the municipal cultural institutions and their staff who currently rely on the grant; the five-year horizon lets those institutions migrate to a mixed model — admission and membership revenue, local philanthropic and business sponsorship, and where a municipality's own electorate genuinely values a cultural institution, locally-raised and locally-accountable funding rather than a centrally-formula'd grant. The five years honour reliance without pretending the function has an enduring claim on involuntary national taxation.

Rationale

Funds the wage component of municipal cultural-task staffing — the salaries of staff in municipal cultural institutions. It is the personnel-cost counterpart to the Cím 1.5 cultural-task grant, and it shares that line's classification: discretionary cultural allocation, phased out over five years. Because this line is specifically payroll, the transition mechanism here is severance-with-overlap rather than a pure funding glide. The protected party is municipal cultural-institution staff — generally skill-transferable workers, many part-time — who receive a transition period during which they retain their post while the institution rebuilds revenue and during which they may take other employment. The five-year line horizon is the funding glide for the institutions; the severance component runs over the first two years of that window and protects the workers specifically. The fiscal logic is the standard two-component split: the wage component is bridged by severance, while institutions a community genuinely values transition to admission, membership, sponsorship, and locally-accountable funding.

Rationale

Funds a salary supplement for teachers and staff working in disadvantaged-area public education — the `esélyteremtési illetményrész` directs additional pay to those working with disadvantaged pupil populations. It is a conditioning component of the public-education task grant (Cím 1.2), targeted at the schooling of children whose circumstances the framework treats as an involuntary disadvantage. Classified Keep on the same basis as the education line it supplements. The per-pupil-funding reform direction noted for Cím 1.2 would absorb this supplement as a needs-weighting in the per-pupil entitlement — additional funding following the disadvantaged child — rather than as a separate salary line, but that is a structural reorganisation, not a phase-out.

Rationale

Subsidises the operating deficit of local public transport that municipalities are statutorily obliged to provide. The seen beneficiary is the rider whose fare is held below the cost of carriage; the unseen cost-bearer is the general taxpayer, including those in municipalities with no local transport at all and those who never use the service. More importantly, a fixed operating subsidy to a deficit is precisely the soft-budget-constraint pathology: the subsidy detaches the operator's revenue from the value riders place on the service, so there is no signal telling the operator which routes, frequencies, or fare structures the riders actually want. Capital and labour are then allocated to the routes the subsidy formula rewards rather than the routes passengers would pay for. The reform is not to abolish local transport but to abolish the open-ended deficit subsidy: move to a transparent, time-limited service contract where the municipality specifies the routes it wants and tenders them, with fare revenue and any explicit subsidy both visible. The function survives; the soft budget constraint does not. The five-year horizon protects current operators and lets municipalities re-procure on transparent contracts.

Rationale

A technical reconciliation line covering the year-end settlement of differences between formula entitlements and actual data across the municipal grant system. It is not a programme in its own right; it is the accounting true-up that any formula-based transfer system requires. The classification follows the lines it reconciles — predominantly the Keep and Nominal-Freeze formula grants of Cím 1 and the operational support of Cím 2 — and the reconciliation function is retained as long as a formula grant system exists.

Rationale

Funds the tasks of the 19 vármegye (county) authorities. The county tier in Hungary was substantially hollowed out in 2011–2013: county institutions (hospitals, schools, social homes) were transferred to the central government, leaving the county authorities with a narrow residual mandate centred on territorial development planning and coordination. The line funds a tier whose substantive service functions were already removed, and whose remaining role — regional development coordination — duplicates functions exercised at both the municipal and central levels. This is the case the framework flags: a layer of government whose enduring rationale is unclear once its operating institutions are gone. The honest classification is a phase-out: the genuinely necessary residual functions (statutory territorial-planning duties) transfer to the municipal associations or the central planning apparatus, the county-authority apparatus is wound down, and the line falls to zero over four years. The protected party is the county-authority staff — a small headcount with general public-administration skills, suited to severance-with-overlap, but the scale here is modest enough that a straight four-year administrative wind-down is the cleaner frame.

Rationale

A discretionary reserve from which the central government provides ad-hoc support to municipalities in financial difficulty. The structure invites the public-choice critique directly: a centrally-controlled discretionary fund, allocated case-by-case by the allocator, with no formula and no published entitlement. Whatever the intent, a discretionary municipal-rescue fund concentrates a benefit (the rescued municipality) and disperses the cost (all taxpayers), and it does so through a channel where the allocation decision is political. It also softens the budget constraint of every municipality: a council that knows an extraordinary-support pot exists has weaker incentive to live within its means. The reform is to replace discretionary rescue with a rules-based mechanism — a transparent, formula-driven hardship adjustment within the Cím 1 grant, with published criteria — so that genuine fiscal distress is addressed predictably and the discretionary channel is closed. Three years lets the rules-based replacement be legislated and lets municipalities currently relying on discretionary top-ups adjust.

Rationale

Funds the repair of municipal infrastructure damaged by natural disasters — floods, storms, and similar irreversible involuntary harm events. Disaster relief for damage no party could have contracted against, affecting infrastructure whose loss is genuinely involuntary, sits inside the framework's protective-response category. A municipality cannot insure its way out of every catastrophic event, and the harm is sudden, irreversible, and not the result of any party's choice. Classified Keep. The honest qualification is that the line should fund genuine force-majeure repair and not become a general capital top-up for routine municipal investment; the discipline is in the eligibility definition, not in the existence of the line.

Rationale

Funds municipal purchase of firewood and other heating fuel distributed to low-income households for winter heating. The line is small and tightly targeted at a defined vulnerable group facing a genuine seasonal hardship. It survives the framework's tests as a targeted protective transfer rather than a broad subsidy: it is means-conditioned, capped, and directed at involuntary winter hardship among the poorest households. Classified Keep. The honest efficiency observation is that an in-kind fuel transfer is a less efficient instrument than a cash transfer of equal value — in-kind delivery imposes procurement and distribution costs and removes the recipient's ability to choose the heating solution that suits their dwelling. The reform is instrument substitution (fold the value into the means-tested social cash assistance), not abolition, so the classification stays Keep.

Rationale

A named capital appropriation to a single municipality — Karcag, in Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok megye, population approximately 20,000 — for property development. A line-item capital grant earmarked in the national budget for one named municipality's development project is the clearest form of the public-choice pattern in this chapter. Karcag's roughly 20,000 residents receive a project worth approximately 225,000 Ft per resident; the cost is spread across the entire national taxpayer base, of whom that municipality's residents are a small fraction. There is no formula, no published criterion, no competitive allocation — the budget simply names the recipient. This is subjective allocation of national tax revenue to a geographically-concentrated beneficiary by political officeholders. The contrast with the Cím 1 formula grant is the whole point: the formula grant, whatever its other defects, at least allocates by rule; a named single-municipality earmark allocates by discretion. If Karcag's property development is worth doing, it can be financed by Karcag — from its own revenue, from borrowing serviced by the development's returns, or from the formula grant that funds every municipality on equal terms. Classified Immediate Cut: there is no protected reliance interest that abolition would violate; if the project is mid-contract, the honest treatment is to honour signed contracts through run-off and cut the unobligated remainder, but a forward appropriation for a named project carries no such claim by default.

Rationale

A direct operating grant to music-arts organisations — orchestras, ensembles, and similar bodies. The analysis matches Cím 2.4.4: discretionary cultural allocation in the subjective-valuation domain, with no price signal to inform the allocator's choice of which organisations to fund and at what level. Phased out over five years on the same mechanism. The larger line size relative to the dance grant reflects the larger fixed costs of orchestral organisations, which makes the reliance interest somewhat heavier and the five-year horizon appropriate rather than shorter — orchestras need the full period to build subscription bases, touring revenue, and sponsorship relationships capable of sustaining a fixed ensemble.

Rationale

Funds the county-scope city libraries. Libraries carry a stronger claim than museums or cultural programming: beyond their cultural function they serve as access points to information, public-document access, digital connectivity, and basic civic infrastructure, particularly for lower-income residents without home internet or reference resources. That function is closer to a general civic-access service than to a discretionary cultural allocation, and the case for an abrupt phase-out is correspondingly weaker. At the same time, the line is not a rights-protection or constitutional function in the strict sense, and the digital substitution of many traditional library functions means expansion is unwarranted. The classification that fits is a nominal freeze: hold the allocation flat, let real-terms erosion apply slow pressure, and let municipalities and libraries develop supplementary revenue and local funding where their electorate values the service. The freeze avoids both stranding a genuine civic-access function and treating library subsidy as permanently expandable.

Rationale

Funds the county-scope city museums. Museum provision sits, like the Cím 1.5 cultural grant, in the domain of subjective valuation: there is no price signal and no external aggregator that determines the optimal scale or mix of museum activity. Visitor numbers, admission revenue, membership, philanthropic giving, and corporate sponsorship are the channels through which a community reveals what it values in its museums; a central grant substitutes the allocator's judgement for those signals. This is discretionary cultural allocation, not a rights-protection or constitutional function. Phase-out over five years. The protected party is the museums and their professional staff, who have a real reliance interest and need time to build a mixed-revenue model — admissions, membership, sponsorship, and where the holdings are genuinely valued, local or philanthropic endowment. Hungary's heritage holdings are not at risk in this framing: collections of genuine national significance can be protected through a narrowly-defined heritage-preservation function, distinct from operating subsidy, but the routine operating grant to county-scope museums is discretionary allocation and is phased out.

Rationale

Funds municipal-level museum institutions below the county-scope tier. The analysis is identical to Cím 2.4.1: discretionary cultural allocation, no price signal, no external aggregator of the optimal scale. Phased out over five years on the same mechanism, with the same narrow heritage-preservation carve-out for collections of genuine national significance.

Rationale

A direct operating grant to dance-arts organisations. This is discretionary cultural allocation in its purest form: a central transfer to specific named-genre arts organisations, with the allocator deciding which organisations, at what level, on a judgement that no price signal informs. The performing arts are the textbook subjective-valuation case — what audiences value is revealed only through ticket purchases, subscriptions, philanthropic giving, and sponsorship. A standing operating grant detaches the organisation's revenue from its audience's revealed valuation. Phase-out over five years; the protected party is the organisations and performers, who have a reliance interest and need time to build audience, subscription, sponsorship, and philanthropic revenue.

Rationale

A one-off appropriation for commemorating the 500th anniversary of the 1526 Battle of Mohács. A discretionary central grant for a commemorative event is subjective allocation of national tax revenue by political officeholders to a cultural-commemorative activity. It is not a rights-protection function, not a constitutional precondition, not a response to involuntary harm; and as a one-off event grant it has no dependency chain and no contracted counterparty whose good-faith reliance would be violated by its removal. The seen beneficiary is the commemorative programme; the unseen cost-bearer is the general taxpayer who funds it without being asked whether a 400 millió Ft state-funded commemoration is what they would choose. A commemoration the public genuinely values can be funded by those who value it — through voluntary contribution, sponsorship, admission, and the participation of the historical and cultural organisations for which Mohács is significant. Classified Immediate Cut: there is no transition to manage, because there is no protected reliance interest.

Rationale

Funds the maintenance and renovation of ferry and river-crossing infrastructure. For settlements where a ferry is the only practical river crossing, the service is genuine local transport infrastructure rather than discretionary spending — the alternative for residents can be a substantial detour, and the crossing is closer to essential local connectivity than to a subjective allocation. At the same time, this is a small, bounded, self-limiting line: the number of ferry crossings is finite and not growing. A nominal freeze fits — hold the line flat, let real-terms erosion apply gentle pressure toward operating efficiency, and avoid both stranding genuinely essential crossings and treating the line as expandable.

Rationale

A small `érdekeltségnövelő` (interest-increasing) grant: a matching-style central top-up that rewards municipalities for spending their own funds on library collection development. The mechanism is a central inducement designed to steer municipal spending toward an activity the central allocator has decided to favour. If a municipality's electorate values library collection development, the municipality can fund it from its own budget; if it does not, a small central inducement to do so anyway is precisely the substitution of the allocator's preference for the local one. The line is small and the classification follows the principle, not the size: phase out the central inducement over three years, leaving collection-development decisions to municipalities and their electorates.

Rationale

This line compensates the owners of residential buildings damaged by `martinsalak` — a steel-production byproduct of the Ózd steelworks used as a construction aggregate in northern Hungary in the 1970s and 1980s, which expands on contact with moisture and structurally damages the buildings it was used in. The compensation scheme is governed by `40/2003. (III. 27.) Korm. rendelet`, and its defining feature for classification purposes is that it is a *closed-class* entitlement: eligibility is limited to owners who reported their building's damage by 15 January 2002. No new claims can enter. This is a settled restitution obligation to identified individuals who suffered involuntary property damage from a state-enterprise-era construction practice — exactly the good-faith-reliance, accrued-individual-entitlement category the framework protects as a rule-of-law commitment. It is classified Keep, but with a specific character: it is a finite legacy obligation that runs off as the remaining eligible claims are settled. The line falls naturally toward zero as the closed cohort of damaged-property claims is honoured; no policy phase-out is needed because the programme has no future enrolment and self-terminates on completion.

Rationale

This is a small line, and its size is not the point — the principle scales regardless. It funds the "unrecovered costs" of a *designated* (`kijelölt`) public-interest provider for emptying septic systems in areas without sewer connection. The structure is the tell: the state designates a single provider, fixes the service, and then funds the gap between the price the provider may charge and its costs. That is a state-constructed monopoly with a state-funded loss — the regulator-and-subsidy pair is part of the construction, not a cure for a market failure. Septic emptying is an ordinary, contestable service: multiple licensed haulers can compete on price and reliability, and households can contract directly. The honest classification is a phase-out of the designation-and-subsidy arrangement, replacing it with open licensing of haulers and direct household payment, with targeted social support for genuinely low-income households folded into the existing social-assistance lines rather than delivered as a producer subsidy. Three years allows the designated provider's current obligations to run off and a competitive market to form.

Rationale

A named operating grant to a single institution — the Mindszentyneum in Zalaegerszeg, a museum and exhibition centre dedicated to Cardinal József Mindszenty. A line-item operating subsidy to one specifically named cultural institution is discretionary allocation by political officeholders in its most legible form: the budget names the recipient. The institution's cultural and historical interest is not in question; the question the framework presses is whether an institution of genuine value needs a standing claim on involuntary national taxation, or whether it can be sustained by admission revenue, the religious community for which Mindszenty is a significant figure, and philanthropic and sponsorship support. Phased out over three years; the protected party is the institution, which uses the period to build a mixed-revenue model.

Rationale

A named capital grant to one Budapest district for public-space development around a named park. The same single-municipality earmark pattern as Cím 3.5–3.8. A district's public-space development, if its residents value it, is a municipal capital decision funded from the district's own budget or the equal-terms formula grant — not a discretionary national-budget earmark. Classified Immediate Cut.

Rationale

A named capital grant to a single small municipality for renovating its sports hall. The principle is identical to Cím 3.5 and scales regardless of the small amount: a budget line that names one municipality and one facility is discretionary allocation of national tax revenue to a concentrated local beneficiary, outside any formula or competitive criterion. A municipality's sports facility, if its residents value it, is funded from the municipality's own budget or the equal-terms formula grant. Classified Immediate Cut, with the standard honour-signed-contracts qualification.

Rationale

A named capital grant to one municipality for one building repair — the roof of a doctor's surgery. The same reasoning applies as for Cím 3.5 and 3.6: a single-municipality, single-facility earmark is discretionary allocation outside any rule. The healthcare-access character of a doctor's surgery does not change the classification of the *funding mechanism*: routine municipal-facility maintenance is exactly what the general operating grant (Cím 1.1) and a municipality's own budget exist to fund. Carving a 15.3 millió Ft roof repair into the national budget as a named line is discretionary allocation, not a healthcare-rights function. Classified Immediate Cut.

Rationale

A named capital grant to one municipality for ferry and access-road renovation. The same single-municipality earmark pattern as Cím 3.5–3.7. Ferry maintenance in general is addressed by the formula-style Cím 3.2 line; a separately-named earmark for one municipality's crossing is discretionary allocation on top of the rule-based channel that already exists. Classified Immediate Cut: the genuine ferry-maintenance need is met through Cím 3.2 and the municipality's own budget, not through a named national-budget line.