Problems with the business development department 

Officially there is a department for business development in the Dachau town hall. Unofficially, however, it has long been known that the department has been causing problems for years. Finally, during the heyday of the Corona crisis, Mayor Florian Hartmann even had to admit: "Economic development does not currently exist." Is the newly formed Economic Advisory Board the solution?

Dachau - When the shutdown in public life showed its first brutal traces at the end of March and beginning of April, the telephones did not stop at the business development offices in the town hall. Sure, the traders in the large district town wanted to know what was going to happen to them, whether they would be helped, whether they would survive the crisis.

The problem: the phones were not busy. Department head Stefan Wolf has been on sick leave for a long time, the two 15-hour part-time workers were at home for childcare, and the only remaining colleague from Dachau's business development agency comes from the Pfennigparade Foundation for the Disabled and is responsible for data maintenance activities. So Thomas Ernst, as treasurer these days actually dealt with other things, had to take the talks.

Was this time stressful for him? "It was fine," sighs Ernst when asked. But he also admits that the topic "Dachau is acting" - an information platform with which local entrepreneurs should be supported - "would have been a classic topic of business development". Due to the absence of Wolf & Co., the topic stuck with him. City councilors who criticized the commitment of the administration in times of crisis could not say more than in Mayor Florian Hartmann: "At the moment there is no economic development."

As annoying as this fact may be for a city of 47,000 inhabitants like Dachau, especially in times of crisis, it is also known that economic development has been sleeping in a sleeping beauty for years. The fact that there is still no start-up center - not even a concept for it - that a company like Thorlabs GmbH has left, is why not a few blame this gap in the town hall. Not even Chamberlain Ernst can deny that the most important work of the Department of Economic Promotion was to host the Advent calendar competition at the town hall.

But Ernst also protects his colleagues, especially the chief economic sponsor. Ernst does not want to hang the problem up on individual people. Why hasn't the long-term department head been removed or replaced long ago? "It's not so easy without simply creating a new job!"

In fact, the city administration has been trying to upgrade the economic development staff for a long time. The city council had long rejected this in its non-public job consultations. Whether Wolf's non-dismissal has to do with the fact that he is a CSU member and was deputy election director in the 2002 election - at that time 3,500 ballots had disappeared from the town hall, which had caused a national scandal - has not been established. From the town hall administration and the city council one only hears: "There were people in the CSU who were close to him."

However, some doubt whether a voluntary business advisory board, as the majority of the main committee had recently decided, could bring momentum to the acquisition of new businesses. Kämmerer Ernst points out that such a body "makes sense to a certain extent"; How to structure the work of this body must ultimately be worked out by the business development department.

The ÜB on the city council also sees no rescue in an economic advisory board, as city councilor Ingrid Sedlbauer recently confirmed. The city now does not need an economic advisory council, but first an effective economic promoter who is "serious, sometimes teasing, and finally presents a business tax development concept that says: How do we want to deal with our own and third-party commercial space in principle? Which companies do we absolutely want to hold? What kind of businesses do we want to locate in the future? "

Wolf's predecessor in office, Jürgen Kuhr from Munich, had wanted to work conceptually in the early 2000s, but his ideas failed. In the end, in 2005, he said goodbye to longer sick leave and is now employed in the municipal office for school, childcare, youth, social and sports.

Wolf, who had previously worked in the registry office and building authority and had taken on his new task with a lot of advance laurels, then showed a different understanding of work: As early as 2006, business people accused him of “managing than promoting” ". Or maybe Wolf just didn't know what to do: Mayor Peter Bürgel, for example, had declared in the city council in 2006 that the job description was "already set down" - "just not in writing".

Practitioner Peter Gampenrieder believes that "a strong man with his own ideas" was perhaps not really wanted, "so far there has been no real suffering". However, the economic situation of the city of Dachau is currently so bad that action has to be taken. In fact, the city has been looking for an economic promoter for three months now, with the approval of the city council.