The outrage was great in the summer of two years ago. Some activists in the Women’s Union didn’t want to just let it be that a majority of SPD and Greens in the Haarer municipal council had rejected the new kiosk offered by Deutsche Bahn. They saw a great missed opportunity to finally get rid of the eyesore on the spot and collected 1800 signatures to express their protest. Then there was silence for a long time on the hot topic at the site. Until recently, the problem was solved by itself, as if by magic: Deutsche Bahn put up a new kiosk. According to the town hall, the community was not asked at all and, as Mayor Andreas Bukowski (CSU) explains, has no say in the matter.
The ramshackle hut with the newspaper racks in front of the door is the shabby remnant of a train station that made a run-down impression up until a few years ago. But at the instigation of the community and with a lot of money from the town hall, the station entrances in the north and south were renewed and the passage artistically designed. The kiosk with the toilet building directly behind it remained standing. Then, in December 2020, Deutsche Bahn came forward with a proposal to build a new kiosk based on a modular concept. Municipal councils from both parties also warned against blocking the possibilities for an overall concept with the new building.
The negative vote from April 2021 is now apparently irrelevant. This first became public when Mayor Bukowski surprisingly announced at the citizens’ meeting in December that a new kiosk would be built by autumn 2023. SPD local councilor Thomas Fäth asked the local council, whereupon Bukowski confirmed that the local council no longer needed to deal with the issue. Also unexpected for many, two railway managers recently appeared on the municipal council’s building committee and explained the plans. This was not announced on the agenda. Nevertheless, everyone left the meeting in the end, convinced that the topic was over and that a new kiosk was coming.
Mayor Bukowski explains the turnaround and also the unorthodox information policy by saying that he passed on “red-hot” information in December and that the railways offered to present the plans to the construction committee at short notice. In the building committee, Peter Schiessl (SPD) protested against the hoppla-hopp procedure. Ulrich Leiner (Greens) also finds that the topic was treated “surprisingly”. In retrospect, the CSU’s outrage and the signature campaign two years ago were a “storm in a teacup” in a teacup.
Mayor Bukowski, on the other hand, thinks that the municipality should have given its place in spring 2021. At that time, Deutsche Bahn made the offer to renew both the kiosk and the toilet facility if the municipality contributed a subsidy of 100,000 euros. From Bukowski’s point of view, the community is now in a worse position because they now have to renew the toilets themselves for at least 170,000 euros. Green councilor Leiner counters that the railways have not promised to provide the community with a new toilet for a 100,000 euro subsidy for the kiosk. At that time, the information was rather: “The renovation of the toilet facility is the task of the municipality.”
In any case, the new kiosk bursts in the middle of the plans for a comprehensive redesign of the town center and in particular the area around the station via an integrated urban development concept (Isek). A new bus station is to be built on the parking lot south of the railway line and it has not yet been clarified how the footpaths from the platform access to the buses will be designed. Could the new kiosk then stand in the way? Or the new toilet house that the municipality is also planning? And how does all this fit together architecturally? The discussions in Haar about the eyesore should therefore continue.