A recent ECJ judgment on the interaction between inter-municipal cooperation and EU law
By its recent judgment in the case C-480/96 Stadtreinigung Hamburg the ECJ sets out in which conditions an inter-municipal cooperation agreement falls outside EU law, especially the EU public procurement rules. Public authorities, especially municipalities, enter into inter-municipal cooperation agreements as a way of discharging their public functions. These agreements constitute a cost-effective option for delivering a wide range of public services, and they are based on forms of public law (such as statutory joint authority, joint committee, or delegation of powers) or private law forms (contracts creating a joint venture company or outsourcing public tasks). In Stadtreinigung Hamburg the ECJ considered whether a contract concluded by a number of German local authorities, by which they pooled together their own resources (capacity at a thermal incinerator and spare landfill capacity) in order to perform statutory public interest tasks regarding waste disposal was caught or not