It remains to be seen whether the residents of Ottersberg will be able to withstand ten percent more traffic, as according to a current report from the construction of the new Poingen residential areas W7 and W8. In May, when the report commissioned by its community and paid for by Poing on the traffic development on the state road after the completion of the last two Poingen building areas had been published, a Plieningen municipal council had predicted the opposite.
Nonetheless, all the local councils in Pliening have now voted to give up their opposition to the Poingen plans, and asked the mayors of both communities, Roland Frick (CSU) and Thomas Stark (non-party), to come to the press conference the next morning, not just to get the documents for one to present an out-of-court settlement in the neighborhood dispute, but also to demonstrate their unity.
Not a sheet of paper seemed to fit between the town hall chiefs, who wanted to draw a line by signing the bilateral agreement, under a norm control action brought by Pliening in 2019 against the building plans of the much larger neighbor. Linked to this is certainly also the hope that certain resentments that have developed on Plieninger’s side with a view of Poing’s growing building areas can be pacified. Poing, which is growing into the Pliening municipality on its northern edge – a decade-old property swap has created the municipal boundaries as they are now – is a red rag, especially for many long-established Plieningen residents.
For many, the construction activity of the neighboring community, which, due to its location on the S-Bahn, was determined by the regional planning association as the upcoming settlement focus in the 1970s and is expected to grow to 20,000 inhabitants by 2025, has always been a thorn in the side. This is one of the reasons why a majority of the Pliening municipal council agreed on the norm review complaint in autumn 2019. Just after the civil engineering work for the residential area W7 “Lerchenwinkel” and the grammar school for 1000 pupils had started that September in Poing. Which threatened the completion of the school, planned for 2023, even if Plieninger had repeatedly assured that this was precisely what they did not want. After all, they would also like to have a high school in Pliening. However, in all the years in which one building area after the other had emerged, the neighbor in the south failed to take care of the appropriate roads that would enable new residents, not of all things through the small district of Ottersberg to Kirchheim and the A 99 to drive. In doing so, Poing violated the principle of conflict resolution, which is formulated in the building code.
However, neither parishes were happy with the neighborhood dispute. And, so it was read between the lines at the meeting of the two mayors the morning after the approval of the out-of-court settlement in the respective municipal councils: With a little more communication, the legal dispute could have been avoided.
The fact that an agreement is the only viable option was recognized in Pliening when the report published in May predicted a lower increase in traffic than the 13 percent previously assumed. The load should increase from 10,500 to 11,700 vehicles per day. An increase, as Frick explained, which the state road could cope with, and the prospect of a lawsuit for Pliening had shrunk accordingly. But because 1200 vehicles are more than 1200 vehicles, Poing is now financing a whisper floor covering in the Ottersberg area, as well as the installation of a traffic light for pedestrians. Pliening had been struggling for this for years, so it is a real asset for the residents. The pavement is said to cost Poing € 200,000, the traffic light € 20,000 – which did not spark any great enthusiasm in the local council, reported Mayor Stark. But in the end the wish to settle the dispute won out, especially “we wanted to have planning security for the grammar school”, he emphasized.
As Stark explained, construction work for the measure should begin next spring, while work on a roundabout will begin at the end of Poing, between Plieninger Strasse and Poinger Westring, to facilitate the threading of traffic into the state road. Conversely, Pliening undertakes not to take action against the neighbors’ building measures as long as the neighbors comply with the key points of the existing development plans, i.e. do not create more living space than planned.