Unlawful building decision
Dresden’s Waldschlösschenbrücke bridge is a thorn in the side of many. The Elbe Valley even lost its World Heritage title because of it. A few weeks ago, the Federal Administrative Court in Leipzig ruled that the planning approval decision to build the bridge was unlawful. What now?
The Waldschlösschen Bridge, which crosses the Elbe at one of its widest points and is intended to relieve Dresden’s Neustadt district and the neighboring bridges, has been the subject of controversy for years. It was built from 2007 and completed in 2013. It was based on a city council resolution from 1996 and a positive referendum in 2005. At the same time, however, there were mass protests and sit-in blockades. Applications to stop the construction failed and courts rejected the complaints of bridge opponents. In 2009, Unesco even stripped Dresden’s Elbe Valley of its World Heritage title because the bridge had severely altered the landscape. Conservationists also continued to fight against it.
A few weeks ago, the Federal Administrative Court in Leipzig ruled that the planning approval decision to build the bridge at the beginning of 2004 was unlawful.
More specifically, this concerns a strict fauna-flora-habitat impact assessment in accordance with European directives and a species protection assessment. The project had already been planned and approved in February 2004. At that time, the site was not yet specially protected as a site of Community importance. This classification under the Fauna-Flora-Habitat Directive (FFH Directive) was not made until the end of 2004. The impact on the environment should have been reassessed before the bridge was built.
The judges of the Federal Administrative Court have now ordered both assessments to be carried out in order to rectify the deficiencies in the planning approval. The current condition is to be determined, which will then be compared with the values before the bridge was built.
As a result, a complaint by the Saxony Green League, which wanted the planning approval decision to be overturned in its entirety and declared unenforceable, came to nothing. Despite everything, the structure remains standing.
Waldschlösschen Bridge construction site
“The state capital of Dresden will do everything in its power to catch up on these two procedures as quickly as possible in order to eliminate the deficiencies identified by the court in the planning approval procedure of the State Directorate of Saxony,” assures Raoul Schmidt-Lamontain, Dresden’s Mayor of Construction. And Uwe Dewald, Head of the Planning Approval Department at the Dresden State Directorate, tells DNN in more detail that he intends to present a revised planning approval decision this year. He says that the data is available and that there is constant monitoring of the bridge. Dewald considers demolition to be out of the question, because “according to the data available to us, there has been no drastic deterioration.”
The results of the tests will ultimately determine what happens next: if the tests show that the bridge has a significant impact on nature, the advantages and disadvantages of the bridge will have to be weighed up again. Let’s wait and see whether the dispute then goes into the next round.