The atmosphere is explosive right from the start. Mayor Andreas Bukowski (CSU) takes his old rival Peter Paul Gantzer (SPD) head-on with his first words. He asks how he came to write about a “black building” in his application. “You have to stick to the truth.”
The tone is therefore the same in the following dispute in the Haar municipal council over a club hut for the local maypole friends, which the SPD believes should not be given free of charge and should not be given exclusively to them. It is basically a petitesse, but also a stage play about a culture of debate, in which a subdued political professional from the SPD appears, a CSU local councilor Alois Rath, who accuses the SPD of having made a “really, really lousy proposal”. , and with Gerlinde Stießberger a CSU municipal councilor who does not separate private and public interests.
The conflict in the most recent meeting of the municipal council is initially a repeat of the feud between the newcomer to the mayor’s office and Peter Paul Gantzer, who, after decades in the state parliament, is now involved in municipal politics and likes to give the mayor lessons. But it is also the second chapter of the symbolically highly charged dispute about the hut on Gronsdorfer Straße in the center of town.
From the point of view of the CSU, the SPD allowed itself borderline questions in the summer of 2022. At that time it was about exceeding construction limits. That has been corrected. So it’s no longer a black building, as Gantzer admits. But everyone knew back then that the SPD was shooting at a club of dignitaries. The respected former third mayor and influential property owner Hans Stießberger is the figurehead among the maypole friends.
So Hans Stießberger sits among the audience as Bukowski and Gantzer now deliver the overture to renewed controversy. Unlike himself, his wife Gerlinde Stießberger is still a member of the municipal council and is not uninvolved in the matter. Like nine months ago, no one bothers about it. The mayor doesn’t mention it. Gerlinde Stießberger, on the other hand, does not withdraw herself from the agenda item, as the municipal code in Article 49 suggests. According to this, a municipal councilor cannot take part in “deliberation and voting” “if the decision can bring him or her” or a “relative” a “direct advantage or disadvantage”.
Advocate of the association in the municipal council: The wife of the chairman
In June 2022, Stießberger even spoke up as an advocate for the maypole friends. This time she does without it, but votes in the end and rejects a compromise mediated by the Greens and accepted by 21 votes to eight. The validity of the resolution does not affect what would have been the case, according to information from a spokesman for the municipal council, if the vote had been decisive.
But this time, Alois Rath, who accuses the SPD of an affront to all volunteers in clubs, is stepping in for the CSU instead. The maypole friends would have prepared the battered hut for themselves and paid the fee that Gantzer wanted. The SPD presents itself as the guardian of the interests of the associations. Gantzer complains that the Maibaumfreunde, with five active members, claim more than 2,000 square meters of communal space for themselves.
On the advice of Mike Seckinger (Greens), the mayor is now trying to talk to the club about whether others are allowed to go to the hut – and how the formal error in the transfer agreement complained about by the SPD can be smoothed out. Incidentally, the mayor of the SPD, Gabriele Müller, had completed it at the time.