A good three years ago, at the beginning of the planning phase, there was hardly anything to be seen of the pond in Kühnhausen. It has happened to those who are unfamiliar with the area, such as construction manager Matthias Schelle, that they simply drove past it in search of the body of water. It silted up more and more, the reed belt got wider and wider. But that is the past. On Wednesday, the parish inaugurated the newly designed local recreation area in the center of the village with the church’s blessing by Pastor Hermann Schlicker. Kühnhausen has a pond again, in which the children can splash around or ice-skate in winter.
The area is already marked as a “park” on Google Maps, said Christina Schubert from the Wipflerplan engineering office – unthinkable recently. The area still looks a little bare, but that will change. Steps lead down to the pond, on the opposite side there is a footbridge, on the meadow there is a bench and a wooden lounger. “Kühnhausen has got its center,” said Schubert. The water combines settlement and nature, because in the south the small local recreation area merges into the hilly landscape. The redesigned area should not only be a point of attraction for the citizens of Kühnhausen, for walkers or cyclists, the enlarged basin also serves as a support in heavy rain. The new sidewalk also makes the way to the bus stop safer for the children.
This was preceded by a long and controversial planning process. Mayor Hermann Hammerl (FWG) recalled the most important milestones. The idea to renovate the pond came up in 2012. First and foremost, it was supposed to be desludged, a budget of 50,000 euros was made available for this in the budget, but this was not called upon. A few years later, the idea of planning something bigger came about. At the end of October 2018, the first public participation took place, the wishes of the villagers were incorporated into the concept, “this resulted in what you can see implemented today,” said Hammerl.
In February 2019, however, the cost calculation was followed by the shock, which resulted in an amount of 1.28 million euros. Initially, not all municipal councils wanted to support such high expenses. However, the municipality received a funding commitment of 69 percent from the Office for Rural Development. It had also been shown that there were contaminated sites in the ground that should have been disposed of in any case.
The groundbreaking ceremony took place in October 2020. The next bad news came in spring 2021, because the excavation was more polluted than expected – and it was not easy to even find landfills that wanted to remove it, as Matthias Schelle described. The material had to be separated first. Nevertheless, it ultimately remained at a budget of between 1.2 and 1.3 million euros, not everything has been settled yet.
Birgit Böhm from the Bavarian Ministry of Agriculture brought a present to the inauguration ceremony: Kühnhausen will receive one of 40 village linden trees that will be planted throughout Bavaria on the occasion of the “40 years of village renewal” anniversary. Böhm recalled that Dorflinden used to have an important function as a meeting place and for dance evenings. The linden tree is also considered a good luck charm: “This is a beautiful symbol for your village.”