There is also no foreseeable majority in the Bielefeld urban development committee for Senner’s supermarket project: Red-Green-Red wants more apartments – Bielefeld

Actually, a resolution of the articles of association marks the end of a development plan procedure. It can be built. But after this decision in the Senne district council for the planned local supply center in the Windelsbleicher and Friedrichsdorfer Strasse area failed due to a stalemate, the council’s urban development committee is now showing rejection, or at least further need for advice.

“If the item is not removed from the agenda, we will vote no,” says Sven Frischemeier, SPD spokesman for urban development policy. Jens Julkowski-Keppler (Greens) also makes it clear that he would like a discussion about what could be done better in the area. Preferably again in the district council. Should that not be possible, he also announced a green no. The SPD and the Greens want the construction of a new Rewe store to be combined at least with additional residential construction, questioning whether the additional local supplier even has to exist.

Legal concerns

Simon Lange, spokesman for the CDU in the urban development committee, cannot understand that. “It’s a role backwards in a long planning process,” he says. Senne’s district mayor, Gerhard Haupt, also wrote to the committee that he considers controversial issues to be fully discussed: The noise report excludes residential development on the street, and an additional floor with apartments on the planned Rewe would shade the surrounding residential buildings, so the finding of the Advisory Board for Urban Design. Lange considers a referral back to the district council to be legally problematic.

Karin Schrader (SPD), herself at home in Senne and also a member of the urban development committee, emphasizes that the SPD had always had a critical stance on the planning in the committee and abstained from voting there in October 2019. “In the same meeting we decided on guidelines for large-scale retail that ran counter to what was planned in Senne.”

Schrader relies on renewed talks with the investor, emphasizing that the planned new building of the savings bank and an optician’s shop will remain possible.

Customs violation

The fact that the Greens, the SPD and the left – actually the minority in the committee – used the absence of CDU mandate holders to overturn the project in the district council is, from the point of view of the CDU and FDP in Senne, a violation of democratic customs. Because the council of elders, made up of representatives of the council groups and Mayor Pit Clausen, agreed on so-called pairing in Corona times: If there are no mandate holders in one political camp, representatives from the other camp refrain from voting to the same extent so that the majority is maintained. Only the Greens refused.

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Pairing is a recommendation, a ‘gentlemen’s agreement’.

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In a statement, the Greens, the Left and the SPD from the Senne district council now stated: “In Senne there was no pairing agreement either in the past or in the current district council.”

But doesn’t the agreement of the council of elders also apply to the district representatives? Matthias Kricke, head of department in the council’s office: The communication of the council of elders only involves the council and its committees, not the district representatives. Pairing is only a recommendation anyway, a “gentlemen’s agreement”. However, the Ministry of Local Affairs has also recommended pairing as a course of action in the further course of the coronavirus epidemic in autumn.

The SPD, the Greens and the Left accuse the CDU of wanting to distract “from its own inability to fill the district seats with its own elected officials”. The CDU had also failed to approach the opposition before the meeting and to inform them that two representatives were absent.

Comment from Peter Bollig

For the opposition in Senne, the lack of two CDU members was a great step forward, which the new regional representatives of the Greens and the SPD, who had no experience with committees, did not want to leave out. Formally, they didn’t do anything wrong. Ignoring the recommendations for pairing from the town hall and the country is at least bad style. All the more so, to accuse a parliamentary group of being unable to fully occupy its seats in times of a pandemic.

To behave like this at the beginning of the electoral term is a heavy burden for the years to come and could also set a precedent in committees in which red-green-red themselves have a majority and would benefit from pairing in the event of failure. As an opposition, the Greens, the SPD and the left in Senne are unlikely to get the majority approval, even for good ideas – including ideas for residential development on the Rewe site.

Irrespective of this, a final rejection of the development plan could cause damage: trusting the resolution of the articles of association – the project was also recently approved by the urban development committee – the investor was allowed to start work on the site. Should it now jump off, a fallow area would remain, and Rewe, Sparkasse, opticians, music school, bakery and, in the vicinity, also Rossmann could bury their plans.

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