Diane Adehm has now been mayor of Hesperange for over a year. She took over from Marc Lies, who had led the municipality for 16 years. While the current mayor would prefer to look ahead, she repeatedly finds herself grappling with matters left behind by her predecessor. The most recent case concerns construction projects that were not properly put out to tender.
The problem is not confined to one or two projects. If Luxembourg Socialist Workers' Party (LSAP) councillor Mathis Godefroid is to be believed, there are at least seven, including the civic centre in Hesperange, the new sports hall at Holleschbierg and the Rotweith housing development in Alzingen.
Contracts worth €130 million in total were awarded to companies without a prior tendering process. It is a state of affairs that once again reflects poorly on the municipality.
Godefroid pointed out that the documents are publicly available. That led, in his view, to a breach of trust among citizens, since the money being spent was their tax money.
Mistakes had been made, and, he admitted, this was another instance in which Hesperange should feel ashamed for having failed to comply with the law.
In the case of public procurement, it should be easy enough to follow the law and yet the current situation stands. If one considered the law to be flawed, one would simply have to push for it to be amended at national level.
Déi Gréng (Green) councillor Stephen De Ron also struggled to understand why the Christian Social People's Party (CSV) and Democratic Party (DP) majority had gone about things this way over such a long period.
While former mayor Marc Lies had apparently seen no fault in his approach, the mood had since changed, at least in part.
During last year's municipal council meeting, De Ron recalled, when the financial audit had been on the agenda, he had received a response that essentially amounted to: "Oh, they're a nuisance, it's all a bit too complicated, and if we had to comply with public procurement rules every single time, we would not make any real progress."
At the time, he said, the Green faction had pointed out that laws existed to be respected. This year, De Ron added, Adehm had acknowledged that the way things had been handled was not right, and had said she intended to stick strictly to the rules from now on.
The mayor of Hesperange confirmed as much in an RTL interview. There had, she said, certainly been an awareness that the law was not being followed quite as strictly as it should have been.
When one wanted to push projects forward, however, one tried to get them moving. Perhaps, she conceded, they had moved a shade too quickly in their eagerness to make progress.
What she could say, she added, was that officials had undergone training and that the municipality had consulted other communes on how they went about such matters.
Even so, this does not mean that similar cases might not come to light in future, since the Home Affairs Ministry has so far only reviewed projects dating from 2023 and 2024.
Before the current law came into force in 2018, there had been a fee schedule set by the Order of Engineers and Architects, which laid down the percentage of construction costs due to architects and engineers.
As a result, the absence of a formal tender had not been a major issue, since everyone had received the same share and no one had been in a position to undercut others with a cheaper bid.
Under the current rules, however, a full programme and set of specifications must be drawn up before a tender for an architect can be issued, which inevitably eats up considerable time in the preliminary phase.
While Adehm acknowledges the errors, she also underlines that Hesperange and Pétange, where no tender was issued for the construction of a car park in Rodange, are not isolated cases.
She is convinced that more than half of the country's 100 municipalities have breached public procurement rules in recent years. That, of course, cannot serve as an excuse for the municipalities themselves.
