City of Jena submits resolution to city council to stop construction of Inselplatz parking garage

The city of Jena will submit a draft resolution to the city council at its July meeting to stop construction of the Inselplatz parking garage. Against the background of the enormous increase in construction costs as a result of the Ukraine war, the costs for the parking garage are currently estimated at up to 31 million euros. At the start of the project, 9 million euros had been estimated.

Mayor Thomas Nitzsche said:

"The decision to cancel the tender for the parking garage was not easy for me. But anything else would be irresponsible in view of the dramatically increased costs and the still increasingly uncertain environment in which construction projects currently have to be realized. In the end, even the approach using the price escalator clause was unable to prevent the bids received from exceeding our financial possibilities. This is when straightforwardness is called for; politics must not wear itself out on the impossible. Instead, we look ahead and see: we can both restart this project changed at the same location and bring more parking spaces elsewhere. "

Before the decision was made not to build the Inselplatz parking garage, alternatives for parking close to the city center had already been examined.

Christian Gerlitz, mayor and urban development deputy, said:

"With the Wiesencenter parking garage in the immediate vicinity, we see a large number of parking spaces that we can include in future plans for the eastern city center. The Wiesencenter was not fully considered in the original decision for the Inselplatz parking garage, but has now emerged as another location for parking close to the city center due to the successful revitalization of the shopping center. For the western part of the city center, especially Eichplatz, we have been able to secure, in very intensive talks with STRABAG, the possibility of almost doubling capacity with a second level instead of the previously planned single-level underground parking garage. This, together with our parking guidance system, will also help us to provide sufficient parking spaces in the city center despite the reduction at Inselplatz. We can only invest every euro once and, especially in the school construction sector, we are facing necessary construction measures where we will face exactly the same distortions in construction costs. Against this background, we can't justify building 422 parking spaces for about 70,000 each."

With a view to the construction project at Eichplatz, the combination of parks and commercial/residential development areas also appears much more promising in terms of cost calculation. This model is now also being examined for Inselplatz in order to achieve the approximately 200 parking spaces required for the operation of the university campus.

The city council meets on July 13, 2022.

Background to the "Inselplatz parking garage" construction project

The result of the competition for the implementation of the Inselplatz university campus envisaged, among other things, the construction of a parking garage directly on the street "Am Anger". This was intended to meet the parking requirements of the university campus and compensate for the parking spaces lost on the "Inselplatz" wasteland. A development plan with planning rights for a special "parking garage" area was created.

Already in the course of the planning phases, the costs for the parking garage rose sharply. Initial studies based on rough estimates assumed total construction costs of 9.2 million euros. These developed to 19.5 million euros in the course of planning in 2019 and were 20 million euros before the start of tendering (February 2022). The main reasons for this are the exposed location (high demand architecture/unfavorable cubature), high requirements for neighborhood protection (noise/pollutants/ventilation) and, lastly, the current construction price development. For this reason, the project went through several optimization phases between 2019 and 2021 (e.g. facades/elimination of office use/investigations into steel/concrete construction).

Based on the result of the public tender now available for the basic construction of the parking garage, it can be deduced that the total construction costs of the parking garage are likely to be around 28 million euros - which would correspond to 66,000 euros per parking space. The current range of expectations for the total costs, also taking into account the material price escalator clause, is between 24 million euros (57,000 euros per parking space) in the "best case" and 31 million euros (73,000 euros per parking space) in the "worst case", with Kommunalservice Jena estimating the probability of the worst case to be significantly higher.