Financial autonomy of the commune in Poland – assumptions and results

The present analysis is devoted to the financial autonomy of communes and the ways of understanding it. The author analyzes the legal, jurisdictional and actual determinants of the commune’s financial independence and points to the consequences following from them. The author poses a hypothesis that the constitutional value in the form of the financial autonomy of communes is not full realized by the parliament in contemporary Poland, with the Constitutional Tribunal underestimating it. The increase in the revenues of communes is not adequate to the duties assigned to them by the parliament. The consequences of the ongoing process include an increased debt of the communes and their problems with realization of the needs of local communities, the latter being the goal whose realization was the reason to have established the local self-government.