Anyone who is at least occasionally on the road should know the problem: You know that you have to turn off somewhere, but you just can’t find the right exit. This is roughly how the majority in the Vaterstetten municipal council has been doing for some time with the Weißenfeld-Parsdorf bypass. It should be clear to most that the project will soon have to be officially abandoned – but it’s just not quite clear how.
The Greens in the main committee have now presented an exit – admittedly falling more into the category of “unpaved dirt road”: One should simply stop all expenditure for the bypass immediately, delete it from all financial planning for the coming years and dissolve any existing budget items. Since the rule that the budget is the measure of all things also applies in municipal politics, the bypass would be de facto done. It was to be expected that the majority of the committee would not want to follow this approach: they did not want to give up a project that had been decided on again and again for decades so unceremoniously.
But that doesn’t mean that you really want to stick with it. Already with the new timetable for the street, which was decided without much debate in the autumn and which means that a subsidy of millions will be forfeited, one could at least suspect a certain withdrawal movement on the part of the CSU and SPD. This came out quite clearly in the debate in committee, when the leaders of the Black and Red factions, who on previous occasions had not entertained the slightest doubt about the construction of the road, expressed precisely that very clearly. To stay with the image, you have already started braking. The fact that you didn’t take the first exit with squeaking tires was due to the caution that is advisable both in traffic and in politics.
Because the exit that the Greens have now proposed would have included the admission of failure – largely self-inflicted. After all, there were warnings that the mammoth project could not be financed long before the Corona crisis, long before the investor subsidy was canceled and long before the economic upheavals to be expected from the war in Ukraine. Even without all these problems, it would have been difficult for the community of Vaterstetten to shoulder their share of the project without having to accept painful restrictions on other projects. The reference to the ongoing global crisis could well be used as a reason for the exit in an upcoming meeting.
Of course, it would be even better and, above all, more face-saving if the administrative court decided against the street. That would be the premium exit, so to speak – and as long as there is still a chance of being able to take it, road friends will probably follow a course that they themselves are no longer convinced of is correct.