Cities and municipalities will probably not be able to apply for federal grants for the modernization of swimming pools and sports halls this year. The Ministry of Construction’s program for the renovation of municipal facilities for sport, culture and youth has been saved, contrary to original plans. Around 200 million euros should be in the budget for 2024, which the Bundestag wants to pass this Friday. That’s about half of last year’s volume.
Shortly before the Federal Constitutional Court’s ruling in November, which made the new budget necessary, an application process took place. New measures should now be selected from this. The program is dramatically oversubscribed. In recent years, measures with a volume of up to three billion euros have been submitted. A good two hundred applications with an average funding amount of almost two million euros have been successful in the past two years. Around ninety percent of the measures affect sports facilities.
The government originally planned to wind down the program, which is financed by the Climate and Transformation Fund (KTF), and only promote measures that had already been approved by the ministry. This would also mean that funds from previous years would have been forfeited. Dennis Rohde, the budget spokesman for the SPD parliamentary group, explained that the budget committee considers its commitments to be a matter of trust, so that they must be implemented. Parliament wants to keep the program alive in the long term.
Depending on the development of the KTF, the program should be increased in the future. “The nice thing about this program is that every swimming pool and gymnasium then has a better energy balance, so this is a win-win situation,” said Rohde: “We help municipalities to continue to maintain their infrastructure and it helps our climate goals. That’s why it was important to us to keep this program in the KTF.”
“31 billion euros in renovation backlog”
“I see it as a good signal that the federal government continues to accept its financial responsibility for the renovation of sports facilities throughout Germany,” commented Kerstin Holze from the executive board of the German Olympic Sports Confederation: “In view of the at least 31 billion euros in the renovation backlog in sport The funds now made available for one year are only a drop in the ocean. What sport actually needs is a sustainable investment program for municipal and club-owned sports facilities that is coordinated between municipalities, states and the federal government.”
Sports clubs that own their facilities and thus relieve the burden on the public sector are excluded from the program. The Parliamentary State Secretary in the Ministry of the Interior, Mahmut Özdemir, called the program “tricky” in a meeting of the Sports Committee; In many cases, new construction is more recommended than renovation. The Ministry of Construction or a committee of experts does not decide on the individual applications, but rather the parliamentarians decide who receives funding and who does not.
Michael Reinsch, Berlin Published/Updated: , Recommendations: 22 Michael Reinsch Published/Updated: , Recommendations: 44 A comment from Michael Reinsch Published/Updated: Recommendations: 6
The funding conditions also surprise some applicants. The Saxon community of Bernstadt auf dem Eigen in the Görlitz district, for example, last year waived the promised funding for the renovation of its forest swimming pool, which was supposed to amount to 1.9 million euros of the total amount of 4.3 million, because any further funding or donations would represent a reduction in federal funding would have resulted. The city council also complained that the mandatory involvement of an energy efficiency expert and a representative for the disabled had increased costs. Mayor Markus Weise of the Free Voters said his community was just one of many that had been surprised by these conditions and was struggling with them.
