Proposal of Financing the Revenue System of Municipalities and Proposing a Framework (Case Study: Tehran Municipality)

Urban sustainable financing is one of the main challenges faced by politicians and urban planners. Municipalities are concerned with decreased revenues and controlling their costs on one hand and due to the income limitation, the inability to finance many urban projects on the other hand. Developing countries, including Iran, which have inefficient economies, poor tax systems and lack of mechanisms for citizen participation in the provision of urban costs, municipal revenue system, is drawn mainly to the unstable and unhealthy resources. This problem showed itself mainly in Iran after implementation of the 1980 municipal self-sufficiency policy and especially took place in Tehran more seriously than other cities. The two major challenges of Tehran Municipality Revenue System consist of: Unstable and unhealthy municipal revenue system and failure of Tehran’s Municipality to achieve the financial and monetary markets to cover the costs of the construction of urban infrastructure and urban projects. Therefore, it is necessary to modify the structure. For this reason, this paper has proposed two models to solve these two challenges. Model No. 1 will bring stabilization of municipality’s income and revenue system in long term in form of two patterns as "Controlling, reducing and phasing out unsustainable and unhealthy sources of income" and "managing, improving and increasing the role of sustainable revenue sources". Model No. 2 also focuses on providing new ways in order for Tehran Municipality to gain access to the financial and monetary markets. Data was collected for the period of 2008 to 2014 including codes of Tehran Municipality revenues and the amount of revenue generated by each code. We also conducted structured and semi-structured interviews with 30 specializing experts in the research topic. The results showed that during the study period, 58% of Tehran Municipality’s earned income has been achieved from unstable and unhealthy sources and 20% from relatively stable resources. Only 22% of revenue is obtained from healthy and sustainable resources. So, Tehran Municipal Income System is quite unstable and unhealthy in the present situation. The most important approaches presented in model 1 are: Replacing the Renovation Duties, Value Added Tax, Unused Land and wasteland complications with income derived from fines and other unhealthy sources, using green taxes, very high increase in the building density fine rate, reducing the number of permits grante