Can Geel lawfully add €10 to every municipal administrative fine?

The city of Geel is continuing to add a €10 administrative tax to every municipal administrative sanction, or GAS fine, despite a renewed warning from Flemish Interior Minister Hilde Crevits

That leaves residents and motorists in this Antwerp province city facing two formally separate demands: the statutory fine and a €10 municipal tax. The distinction matters because Geel says the second amount is not an additional punishment but reimbursement for processing the case. For anyone receiving such a demand, however, the immediate result is still a bill that is €10 higher.

The dispute exposes an awkward gap between Flemish supervision and municipal autonomy. Crevits told the Flemish Parliament

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Geel takes a different legal route. Corstjens told Het Nieuwsblad that the city does not base the €10 charge on road-traffic legislation. It relies instead on municipal fiscal autonomy under Article 170 of the Belgian Constitution

The city council’s own regulation supports that construction in explicit terms. Approved on 15 December 2025 and effective from 1 January 2026 until the end of 2031, it describes the amount as a cash tax covering the administration of GAS cases. It is imposed when the sanction is notified and may be challenged before the mayor and aldermen. Geel had already applied a €10 supplement under an earlier arrangement from January 2025, according to reporting by Het Nieuwsblad.

Crevits’s position is that changing the label does not create the missing legal authority. In a circular sent to local governments in May, she said statutory GAS 5 fine levels cannot be increased through a local supplement. Limburg governor Jos Lantmeeters had previously annulled comparable arrangements in Limburg, while Mechelen subsequently ended its €6 charge from 1 July. Crevits told parliament that additional costs become possible only during a judicial recovery procedure, not simply for issuing and collecting the original sanction.

Geel and the Association of Flemish Cities and Municipalities, VVSG, answer that higher levels of government also recover processing costs. Corstjens points to a federal levy connected with immediate traffic-fine payments, while VVSG questions why a planned Flemish processing centre could attach an administrative charge if municipalities cannot. Their argument is therefore broader than Geel’s €10: comparable public authorities, they say, should be judged by comparable principles.

Political opponents frame the issue as one of trust. Vlaams Belang MP Bart Claes told parliament that surveyed municipalities had collected at least €12 million in contested supplementary costs. Vooruit’s Stephanie Vanden Eede stressed that speed enforcement needs public support and should serve road safety rather than become a revenue model. Those figures and characterisations concern a wider group of municipalities and should not be read as a total attributed to Geel alone.

A recipient can pay the GAS fine while objecting separately to Geel’s tax. Because the city classifies the €10 as a tax, any further appeal belongs before the court of first instance rather than the police court. That procedural burden may deter litigation over such a small sum, leaving the central legal question unresolved unless a determined claimant, the provincial supervisory authority or another competent body forces a definitive ruling.

The next step is therefore likely to come through individual objections and Flemish administrative supervision. Geel says it will send objectors its legal reasoning and organise hearings, while Crevits has promised firmer action when complaints reveal unlawful regulations. Until a court or supervisory decision addresses Geel’s specific tax construction, residents face two confident but incompatible readings of Belgian and Flemish law.