Kongresshaus Garmisch-Partenkirchen: Corona is a drag - next delay

Created: 12/23/2021, 6:30 AM

From: Andreas Seiler

Popular venue: the Kongresshaus, here an archive recording from the Werdenfels festival hall, which was made before the corona pandemic.

You can see the ceremony for the Day of German Unity.

© Thomas Sehr

Corona is proving to be a huge drag on the Garmisch-Partenkirchner Kongresshaus question.

The planned public participation has to be postponed due to the pandemic and should not start until the end of March 2022.

The final referendum is planned for autumn according to the new schedule.

Garmisch-Partenkirchen - If you want to bring people together for an intensive exchange of opinions and ideas these days, it is not easy. Because the strict Corona requirements and contact restrictions massively oppose this concern. The fourth wave of infections is currently determining public and private life in Germany. And with the new Omikron virus variant, the next endurance test is about to begin.

GaPa Tourism also has to struggle with these impairments. Actually, the subsidiary of the Garmisch-Partenkirchen market wanted at the beginning of next year with the support of the commissioned Munich consultancy Cima to get a broad participation process up and running in order to finally get on with the question of what should become of the congress center. But the ongoing Corona crisis is making a huge difference.

The announced series of workshops - we are talking about so-called “real-world laboratories”, in which the complicated topic is to be examined together with experts from different perspectives - has to be postponed by around three months.

It's not the first delay.

Michael Gerber, Managing Director of GaPa Tourismus, had already stepped on the brakes this year to revise the program.

According to a press release, the new start date is now at the end of March.

Gerber also presented the updated timeline to the local council.

"We would like to invite all interested citizens to the process and not exclude anyone due to epidemic conditions such as 2G plus," says Michael Gerber, managing director of GaPa Tourismus GmbH © Thomas Sehr

"We would like to invite all interested citizens to the process and not exclude anyone due to epidemic conditions such as 2G plus," he explains. To forego the face-to-face events and just concentrate on the Internet was out of the question. Because: “In our opinion, a purely digital form of participation is exclusive because the inhibition threshold to participate is much higher, some interested parties may not have technical access or there are other limiting factors,” says Christian Hörmann from Cima. The hope is now that the situation will relax so much by the end of March that the process can go digitally as well as physically with fewer requirements and thus an open door for as many local residents as possible.

Gerber never tires of emphasizing that this is an open-ended procedure. The head of tourism is hoping for a lot from the interactive format, the cost of which the public has not yet learned. And he relies on more objectivity in the sometimes emotionally charged debate. “I would like to see the hard fronts dismantled,” says Gerber. At the end there should be a recommendation to the address of the municipal council. With the aim, the script envisages, to initiate a request for a council, which in turn leads to a referendum. The target for this is late autumn 2022.

Then it could finally be clear where the journey is going. The struggle for the congress center - the aging, community-owned property in a prime location on Richard-Strauss-Platz is operated by GaPa Tourismus - is a neverending story and divides people's minds. Perhaps this is because the ideas and expectations diverge too far. On the wish list is a multifunctional building for citizens, culture and the congress business, which places ever higher demands on the equipment. We are talking about a completely new building, a renovation or a solution that is somewhere in between.

What doesn't make things any easier is a referendum from 2019, in which a clear majority was in favor of maintaining the complex, including renovation and partially new construction.

One does not want to deny this result, emphasizes Gerber.

Only, in his opinion, has failed to put all the arguments side by side and to compare them in advance - and to put reliable facts on the table.

However, there are also voices in the village who demand that the popular will of that time be simply implemented.

But it's about more than a property.

The focus has now shifted to the fundamental question of what tomorrow's tourism should look like.

It is precisely the younger generations who are critical of the winter sports resort's key industry.

They should therefore be addressed more intensively in the course of the participation process.