Palmoli: three children in a care home by order of the court. The municipality pays ninety thousand euros in a year, €4,800 back from the State
11 November 2026, 16:13
Palmoli, in the province of Chieti, has eight hundred and fifty-eight inhabitants, and for a year its municipality has been paying for the children's home in Vasto where the Juvenile Court of L'Aquila placed, from 20 November 2025, the three children of the couple who lived in a farmhouse in the woods. The town hall chose neither the facility nor the length of the stay, but board and lodging are its responsibility: about €244 a day for the three children. In twelve months it has advanced about ninety thousand euros, and the mayor, announcing a budget variation, has warned that for now outgoings must be watched carefully. A State court decides; a village of fewer than nine hundred residents pays.
On paper, there is help. So far about €4,800 has arrived from the State, three fifths of what the town hall had claimed for the first six weeks, those of 2025; for the 2026 fees it will have to wait until 2027. Still to come are the transfers from the body that runs social services in the Alto Vastese area, whose amount and timing are not known. The municipality pays every month, the reimbursement arrives the following year, and only in part.
That reimbursement comes from a national fund for children removed from their families, created by the budget law for 2025. Only municipalities where these costs exceed three per cent of what the State estimates they should spend on social services are entitled to it, and in both 2025 and 2026 the expenses declared have far exceeded the allocation: rather than reimbursing them, the fund shares them out in proportion, so the more municipalities spend, the smaller the share that comes back to each.
Today, according to the National Association of Italian Municipalities, against a fund of €250 million the certified spending is €530 million, and mayors are asking for at least another hundred million. The two hundred and eighty million that are missing remain in municipal budgets, and each council finds them as best it can, by postponing other spending or cutting other social services: either way, with the money of those who live there. Overall, the Authority for Children and Adolescents calculated in January, minors housed in residential care cost the public purse more than €1.3 billion a year. The fees are collected by the children's homes, punctually, every month. The State, through its courts, decides where those children live, reimburses less than half of the cost and does so a year late: the uncovered part stays with the municipalities, which meanwhile also advance the rest.
To the parents, so that they can be with their children at weekends, the municipality has lent a house free of charge for two years; the State, in a year, has paid the town hall back less than twenty days of fees.
This article was prompted by a news item published in il Giornale on 11 November 2026.