Puchheim is now setting limits to swimming pools

Maybe an episode from your vacation at home?

Some people from Puchheim would like to fulfill their dream of a giant pool.

But now there are clear limits.

Puchheim

- Was it a coincidence or was it a consequence of Corona and the resulting more attractive home vacation in your own garden?

In any case, last July, the building committee of the Puchheim city council faced three building applications for partly quite spacious swimming pools.

Two of them had to be rejected, but the administration was commissioned to draw up a policy paper for a uniform approach to the newly planned bathing facilities.

In the most recent meeting, it was now decided: The pools generally remain without approval, unless they extend over more than five percent of the total property area.

Then the building committee reserves the right to make an individual decision.

So far, private pool planners have largely had a free hand.

The Bavarian building code generally allows pools with a capacity of up to 100 cubic meters without the approval of the authorities.

The case can be different if the small new building is located in an area to which a development plan applies and which in turn is less than 30 years old.

Since 1990, the building use ordinance has looked more closely at ancillary facilities such as garages and carports, parking spaces and driveways, garden sheds or even swimming pools.

All of them together are allowed to take up a maximum of half as much space as the actual residential building.

In Puchheim, however, there are hardly any development plans from the pre-reunification period.

Two of the three projects discussed in July come from younger building areas and would have exceeded the 50 percent mark for ancillary facilities.

The regulation that has now been found does not allow long-distance swimming - unless there are many turns or the garden is park-like.

But even behind a narrow row house there would still be enough space for more than just a children's paddling pool.

So-called "natural pools" do not get an eco bonus compared to conventional pools.

The administration quotes its own environmental agency, according to which the supposedly gentle filter technology usually does not work for long and then has to be chlorinated afterwards.

The case is different with the so-called swimming ponds, on the edges of which regeneration zones and real biotopes can arise.

They are exempt from the new provision.

From Olf Paschen