Acta Iuris Stetinensis

The subject matter of competences of the chairman of the commune council have not been analyzed too often in the legal scholarship. The aim of the article is to identify institutions such as public tasks and competences of the chairman of the commune council and to show that the relevant statutory regulation is fragmentary, not comprehensive. The hypothesis of this study involves the admissibility of supplementing the competences of the chairman of the commune’s decision-making body by statutory norms of a given local government unit. The basic research method consists in an analysis of the applicable legal status, the established line of judicial decisions and views of legal scholars and commentator. An empirical method, involving an analysis of selected statutes of communes, complements the methodology. The research demonstrates that supervisory authorities most often use an interpretation that narrows down the scope of the regulation of chairpersons’ power. Such a restrictive interpretation cannot be reconciled with the statutory authority of commune councils, and therefore, whenever necessary, the competences of the chairman of the commune council should be adapted to local conditions, e.g. with regard to granting the right to initiate resolutions. Moreover, the legislator himself, in a number of statutory provisions, has granted various powers to the chairmen of commune councils, sometimes not related to the conduct of the council’s sessions or its work. The analysis carried out in this study validates the hypothesis that the correct interpretation of Art. 19(2) of the Act on commune self-government should lead to the recognition that the legal norm contained in this provision only specifies the tasks of the chairman of the commune’s decision-making body, while the competences necessary to perform these tasks should, first of all, be determined by the statute of a given local government unit.