FDP Darmstadt calls for an emergency program for the western forest

• ofJens Joachim

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Free democrats express criticism of the final report on the “Round Table Forest”. Councilor Akdeniz rejects allegations. Minority opinion on the abstraction of groundwater.

The FDP in Darmstadt will reject the final report of the “Round Table Forest” during the next meeting of the city council in February. The party chairman Leif Blum and the environmental policy spokeswoman for the parliamentary group Ursula Blaum announced this in a statement. Environment officer Barbara Akdeniz (Greens) presented the report and an inventory of the state of the forest on Thursday.

“We are immensely disappointed with the report,” write Blum and Blaum. “High hopes” were initially associated with the dialogue process at the round table. The coalition of the Greens and the CDU have “once again proven that they are unwilling and unable to work on the matter,” and are primarily “interested in their own self-presentation”, according to Blum and Blaum. City councilor Akdeniz rejected these allegations as campaign rhetoric when asked.

Blaum also complains that “nothing happened” when the western forest was required to be designated as a ban forest under green leadership in the town hall and in the regional council. An “emergency program for the western forest” is “urgently required”, for example to increase the groundwater or to contain the roe deer, suggests Blaum.

The report of the round table states that at the end of the “intensive deliberations”, a city councilor from the Uwiga faction and a city councilor from the Left were the only members of the round table to give an “absolute minority opinion” on the subject of groundwater abstraction. The oppositional view is: “In addition, the water abstraction by the Darmstadt and Pfungstadt waterworks of Hessenwasser GmbH & Co. KG has increased so excessively that the most severe forest damage has now spread to the Darmstadt and Eberstädter fir trees.” the report showed that the groundwater levels were “at least seven and a half meters below the ground” as early as 1957. “Therefore they could not contribute to the water supply of the forests.”

Green board spokesman Jürgen Deicke and the CDU parliamentary group leader Alexander Schleith announced that the rescue of the urban forest was a “priority” for the coalition. The participatory dialogue process could “as a Darmstadt model become a role model for other countries and municipalities in dealing with the forest,” said Deicke and Schleith. In this context, near-natural management is “clearly the key to making the forest fit for the future”, according to the representatives of the coalition groups.

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