Ironically, where Deutsche Bahn wants to build its northern access to the Brenner, the federal motorway company wants to create flourishing landscapes beforehand.
The fact that the federal government has big plans is nothing new for the people in the Rosenheim district. The federal government not only has big plans there, but also many – just a lot more than it has space for. Almost 70 hectares of land would not be so little. On the area near the small hamlet of Mintsberg in the municipality of Schechen, the federal border guards used to practice border patrols, far enough away from Austria, a good 50 kilometers away, to be on the safe side. A few weathered signs and a shooting range of the federal police, as the federal border guards have been called for 17 years, have remained. Otherwise, the federal government had continued to grow grass over the area and leased the meadows to local farmers. Now, however, parts of the federal government have other plans, and it is not as if grass would no longer grow in Mintsberg immediately after all these plans. But it would definitely be a different weed.
Because the former free state Autobahndirektion Südbayern, which now belongs to a company called “Die Autobahn GmbH des Bundes”, wants to secure the meadows near Mintsberg as an ecological compensation area for future expansions on the A8. Then the meadows, which are regularly fertilized with manure, would become “blooming meadows rich in species”, as the motorway company says. Such an area should be ecologically more valuable if it has to serve as the prescribed compensation for the motorway expansion. Instead of paying rent for the meadows, the farmers are supposed to get money for tending them, which doesn’t suit all of them, after all they’ve been producing fodder for their cattle on it up until now. So, for once, the farmers rely on another federal company, namely Deutsche Bahn. The farmers around Rosenheim usually fight their plans for a new northern approach to the Brenner Pass with tractor parades. At Mintsberg, however, the tracks are said to run over just part of the area in question. Then there really wouldn’t be much grass growing there, but probably in ten years at the earliest. Should the meadow have become ecologically more valuable by then because of the motorway, it would be the train’s turn again. You would then have to create a lot more compensation somewhere else. For the destruction of a species-rich flowering meadow.