At the 106th Congress of Mayors of France, which has just been held in Paris, we come across mayors in the aisles but also sometimes a mayor on a stand. And not just any mayor. A mayor of Oise. Arnaud Dumontier, mayor of Pont-Sainte-Maxence, on one of the stands of the Ministry of the Interior. His civilian job, so to speak, is to be a special advisor to the command for health and the environment (CESAN) of the national gendarmerie. This service was created in 2023 to track pollution offenses against nature.
General Sylvain Noyau, commander of CESAN, indicated, during a debate held on sitethat the number of offenses linked to illegal waste dumping increased by 85% between 2017 and 2021.
Sometimes with dramatic events. In 2019, Jean-Mathieu Michel, mayor of Signes in the Var, was fatally injured by the van driven by men who had illegally dumped waste.
Closer to us, Christophe Dietrich, mayor of Laigneville, has been noted more than once for his effective return-to-sender methods. He appeared on the France 2 television news following his striking actions in February 2024, and in March 2022.
Nathanaël Rosenfeld, mayor of Orry-la-Ville, has been struggling for years with forest land contaminated by potentially toxic waste and he called on CESAN to help him resolve the problem.
Environmental crime
During the debate held at the Congress, Charlotte Blandiot-Faride, communist mayor of Mitry-Mory (Seine-et-Marne) and vice-president of the Association of Mayors of France (AMF), declared that delinquency environmental “life rots” mayors on a daily basis.
Waste represent around 200 scattered offenses in different codes. “There are 400,000 standards weighing on our shoulders, we cannot know everything”declared Arnaud Dumontier.
To help mayors in their role, Cesan has developed an application, “GEND’élus”, providing mayors with “a toolbox”, with resources, fact sheets, collaborative sharing of good practices in this area, information on the different levers to combat environmental crime.
GEND’elected
The aim of the application is to offer mayors, especially in small municipalities, “a turnkey service, a one-stop shop”specifies Arnaud Dumontier.
But the application is not limited to environmental protection. It details the powers of the mayor as a judicial police officer. He can thus obtain from the police the identity of the owner of a vehicle in the event of an offense. He can fight against wild rodeos but he cannot yet, as the mayor of Compiègne wishes, use a paint-ball gun to mark with paint the driver of a two-wheeler practicing rodeo in the neighborhoods. .
