The tunnel through the English Garden, and thus its reunification, should no longer be planned. The factions of the Greens/Pink List and SPD/Volt decided exactly a month ago. However, there has not yet been an official vote by the city council to stop the plans. Now the district committee (BA) Schwabing-Freimann braces itself against the end for the tunnel. And the initiators of the project, Hermann Grub and Petra Lejeune, don’t want to give up either. They are currently considering starting a petition.

At the end of March, the BA decided that the city should initiate a planning approval, i.e. a building permit, procedure for the tunnel. Whether this actually happens is at least questionable. According to the BA chairman Patric Wolf (CSU) but then the opportunity to see and discuss the plans.

At the press conference on Thursday, Wolf stated his displeasure that the BA was not involved in the decision-making process and the building department will not be able to see the draft design. According to an e-mail from the department at the BA office in Mitte, this is now available. According to the current planning status, around 885 trees with a trunk circumference of at least 80 centimeters are to be felled for the project, around 335 trees more than assumed in the feasibility study. This is also the reason why Green-Red said goodbye to the project.

Because the building department has shown the plans to the majority factions in the city council, but not to his BA, Wolf sees the committee and thus the citizens as cheated. It is normal for district committees to be asked for their opinion – be it for large projects such as subway planning or for smaller construction projects. “To put it bluntly, we otherwise get a blueprint for every new junction box,” says Wolf, who has been in BA 12 since 1996.

The municipal statute grants the district committees, among other things, information rights as well as rights of inspection and consultation. Because the tunnel is a potential major project, Wolf now sees these rights violated. In its email to the BA office, the building department pointed out that political opinion-forming had already taken place. Therefore, one considers the participation of the BA “no longer expedient”.

“If they said there was no money, at least that would be honest.”

When asked by SZ, the building department said that a district committee would be consulted on the “overall planning” as soon as a draft plan was completed and a corresponding city council decision to submit this plan and initiate the plan approval process had been drawn up. “This project status is not available for the English Garden Tunnel.”

BA boss Wolf is now wondering why the department then presented these unfinished plans to the city council factions, on the basis of which they came back to one. “It’s more than strange,” says Wolf. Normally, the district committees would always be informed first, then the city councillors. “The whole process is turned on its head here,” he says.

Hermann Grub and his wife Petra Lejeune only found around 370 trees in their own survey. Grub sticks to his suspicion that the officially much higher number is just an excuse to prevent the project. “If they said there was no money, at least that would be honest.”