Featured photo: stable guard party in Stuttgart
Table of Contents
wool house
Now that it's in the Heilbronner voice today, I can also express my enthusiasm for the new Wollhaus plans. The presentation of the company responsible for it was successful and if everyone then pulls together, this comprehensive conversion of the Wollhaus can be a win for the southern core city. I particularly like the fact that you want to integrate apartments. I liked it even more that the SPD now also agrees to a social quota of 20% and could probably imagine a higher quota after careful consideration. At the first presentation on Monday it all sounded very different; but the SPD could hardly have conveyed this to its voters during the upcoming election campaign. Unfortunately, the SPD continues to refuse to introduce a flat-rate social quota in Heilbronn; this missing quota already has Hannes Finkbeiner reminded several times, also here in the blog.
I'm pretty sure that this project will not fail because of a social quota, because Heilbronn has so far skilfully avoided this with concessions for the builders, e.g. B. by hardly asking for parking spaces for apartments or by the city even building an entire multi-storey car park for their tenants and buyers. And so we can continue to assume that we will all continue to pay for this certainly necessary social quota. That is why the builders themselves will agree to a social quota of 50%.
The only important thing is that we get affordable housing for everyone in Heilbronn as far as possible. This can be approached professionally or like the municipal council and the city administration have done up to now: head in the sand, let others do it and make sure that as much as possible is redistributed — whether it makes sense or not.
It would be better if the municipal council could decide on a flat-rate social quota. If the situation improves in a few years, or more likely decades, these can then be scaled back or abolished altogether. However, after 2019 and 2024, sufficient living space will again be a key issue in the election campaign for the municipal council in 2029 (!).
Perhaps in 2029 the CDU and SPD will finally work hard for a social quota and tell their voters that this is very important to them. So important that they had deliberately neglected to do so for the past few decades.
However, future voters will not care and will then praise these parties for their social conscience and commitment. Until then, an SPD mayor must ask himself why he cannot enforce a social quota in his own party?
Addendum 28.7.2023
councillor Tanja Sagasser-Beil informed me that my statement on the social quota was not correct. The SPD then, when Herbert Burkhardt was still there, applied for a 20% social quota. She means together with the Greens and the Left. And it became clear that there is no majority in the municipal council for it. That was 2014 or 2015 if she remembers correctly.
Hence the idea that there should be a project-related social quota, with the municipal council determining how high the quota should be for each project-related development plan. Without this compromise, nothing would have been decided at the time. Since then, the SPD has often demanded higher quotas than 20%, including for the second construction phase in the Neckar bend.
Thanks to Tanja for correcting me, but I have to say that well intentioned is unfortunately still not well done. Especially with the current housing situation, which already had a major impact on the election campaign in 2019.
There are currently 8 SPD, 8 Green, 2 Left and 2 FWV city councilors on the municipal council, that would already be 20 city councilors who could vote for a social quota of at least 20%. I mean, that's not a bad starting point at all for catching up with other big cities in Heilbronn — you don't have to take Freiburg's 50% as a guide. I think that would definitely result in a majority. An OB would only have to want this.
Stable Keeper Party
Even when I was working, it was always a very pleasant affair, with the "stable guards" gathering for a rather spontaneous and small celebration to discuss the process and the good cooperation for the time together looking after the stables.
I remembered one of these very well, when the stable guards suddenly turned up in an international task force shortly before Christmas and were amazed to find out how little staff you actually have to be able to keep a task force running with and then can. Since that time, I have been firmly convinced that all the staff and especially the administration could only be managed very successfully with a fraction of the staff.
For me, such times as a stable guard were among the best and even today they can still give a good impression of the necessary size of an administration. You take the number of stable guards, add a couple of specialists and you have the size that is actually required for each administration.
In the meantime, however, times have changed and administrations can no longer do without their own XXL version. So it's a good thing that administrations are also beginning to rethink and convert them into remote or community workplaces - very praiseworthy is the Initiative of the mayor of Calw, Florian Kling, who is remodeling his town hall accordingly and thus introducing the order in this administration that should have been standard in every administration since the 1990s.
From the point of view of administrative employees, this even has its very own charm, because you can use it to disguise the respective XXL variant of each administration quite well in the future and the "smartest" employees then even manage to get paid in several administrations across the entire republic at the same time and bring bread — this was previously only possible for Italian civil servants who worked full-time at the same time and very successfully in Rome and Sicily.
And so times are changing, slowly but surely. Up and down the country, stable guard parties are taking place everywhere and at all times, the greatest and most popular ones are obviously in Berlin. But the problem is, there you meet everyone and everyone except the stable guards! — they have probably been working from home for a long time now and completely undisturbed.
Elections
Yesterday I again had the pleasure of hearing the presidential elections of the European Movement Baden-Württemberg to be allowed to lead. Since 1981, this umbrella organization of European associations has also brought together a good 50 associations from Baden-Württemberg in our state, including, of course, the two federalist associations Europa-Union and Young European Federalists.
Elections that go well are a challenge for everyone involved and if the members have already been steeled in the association's work, this is not so easy for the election officer either. Everyone involved knows how elections take place and, even better, how elections can take place in other ways. Then there is the obligatory time pressure, since everyone involved already has other deadlines to take into account.
And so an election officer can consider himself lucky if everyone involved also pulls together, namely then election processes are a fine and not just a statutory matter. Everything went very smoothly in the European Movement, including a change of President. I would like to thank the old President for her commitment and the long-standing trust. I wish the new President good luck in his new office.
That elections can also be completely different and then become a somewhat greater challenge for an election officer, I was able to experience this again just last year. In this case, every election officer then asks himself why he still puts himself through such a thing and the voters with a little experience just roll their eyes.
But in order to really “screw up” an election, you need real professionals. You can still see that in Berlin, where hardly anyone knows which election has to be re-elected. Although all Berliners should be able to do it without exception after more than 30 years of democracy — actually.
