Yelling, whistling, booing – This is how the public hearing on the battery factory to be built in Debrecen took place
Judit Doros;
Debrecen;
2023-01-09 20:44:00
“Take them to Felcsútra or Buda Castle,” said an older man at the public hearing.
After the first few introductory sentences, László Papp, the Fidesz mayor of Debrecen, was interrupted by a shout from the audience at Monday’s public hearing on the construction of the CATL battery factory. He called on the city manager to only tell the truth, not to cover up things that are unpleasant for the people of Debrecen, and not to pretend that everything is perfectly fine with the planned investment. The Chinese company plans to invest HUF 3,000 billion in a 220-hectare area in the southern part of Debrecen. The official documentation for the environmental impact study was submitted to the government office at the end of November.
The interest is characterized by the fact that the huge hall of the Kölcsey Center was filled to overflowing, with more than a thousand people crammed together. They want to quickly try to outline the details of the investment and licensing at the meeting, and more and more people are objecting to why the Chinese investor is not building the factory in China, why they didn’t invite independent experts who impartially informed the attendees, and why they are lying about that the factory does not endanger Debrecen’s drinking water base.
“The lakes around the city have been drying up for years, native trees in the Great Forest are dying due to the lack of water,” several people said.
Loud laughter greeted the statement that the company chose Europe because the European Union has set climate goals that encourage electric car production, requiring local delivery, and that they came to Hungary because the environment is competitive and the workforce is skilled. According to his words, every third vehicle in the world operates with CATL batteries, and according to their intentions, the Debrecen plant will be operational next year, and serial production will begin in 2025.
Colonel Tamás Pintér Antal, the head of the county disaster management directorate, said about the permit procedure: the documents related to operational safety must be decided by January 13. Many people objected to this: they only had a few weeks to see the permit plans as residents, and then they asked the question: why does the city want to “disrupt” this investment so quickly?
At the forum, the mayor said that he followed the accepted city development strategy to aim for as many business ideas as possible in order to offer the young people of Debrecen suitable job opportunities and perspectives. He refuted the claims that the factory’s daily water use is greater than the amount consumed by the city of Debrecen with a population of 200,000. According to him, the factory’s demand is a fraction of that. According to him, the groundwater level and the aquifers used by the city have nothing to do with each other.
A family man living in the Szepes district objected: their house is one and a half kilometers from the planned plant, it was reduced to ten or fifteen million due to a valuable investment of fifty million, it is unsellable, and what he worked all his life for has now become nothing. They tried to talk about this with the Fidesz parliamentary representative of the district, but he didn’t even listen to them, he only brings flowers from time to time when wreaths are needed, he said.
At the public hearing, Erzsébet Schmuck (LMP) also refused: it is not allowed to operate a battery factory not only in Debrecen, but also anywhere else, in the regions of Győr, Komárom, Göd and Fót, and although the local organization had previously initiated a referendum on this matter in the city of Cívis, the signature forms were ultimately not taken. through, because in the meantime the government announced that it wants to create an accumulator superpower from Hungary. Therefore, only referendums that apply to all such plants make sense.