It is still uncertain whether a wind farm can ever be built on the Taunus ridge between Wiesbaden and Taunusstein.

The appeal against the decision of the Wiesbaden Administrative Court, which required the Darmstadt Regional Council to approve the wind farm in the summer of last year, is still pending at the Kassel Administrative Court.

A decision in the second instance is still pending in this case.

Nevertheless, the administrative court has now dealt with the wind farm complex.

However, it was about the more than five-year-old complaint by FDP parliamentary group leader Christian Diers.

Oliver Bock

Correspondent for the Rhein-Main-Zeitung for the Rheingau-Taunus-Kreis and for Wiesbaden.

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    Diers had not wanted to come to terms with the decision of the Wiesbaden Administrative Court of December 2015, with which a decision by the city council had been declared legal a year earlier. At the time, the city council declared the motion to hold a referendum by the opponents of the wind farm, supported by more than 8,000 citizens, to be inadmissible. However, the court agreed with the city council, and Diers then demanded that the appeal be allowed. It has now failed without restriction through an "incontestable decision" at the fifth Senate of the VGH. Diers has to bear the costs of the amount in dispute, which is set at 15,000 euros.

    The Wiesbaden Administrative Court is now confirmed by the second instance in its opinion that the question formulated at the time was already inadmissible and that the citizens' petition was not sufficiently justified on top of that. The question put to the vote at that time amounts to an expression of opinion, but not a decision on the matter, the court ruled. From the point of view of the VGH judges, this legal assessment is not objectionable today either. In addition, Diers' lawyer did not adequately explain the reasons why an appeal against the first instance judgment must be admitted.

    The initiators of the referendum wanted to put this question to the vote at the time: “Are you in favor of keeping the Taunus ridge free of wind turbines?” The Kassel judges also believed that this was not an acceptable formulation. Also not because the decision on the approval of a wind farm is not at all within the competence of the city council. This competence “actually and legally” is not given, because the approval authority is the State of Hesse, represented by the Darmstadt Regional Council. This is one of the reasons why the state is the defendant in the current appeal proceedings after the administrative court ruling from July last year, but not the state capital. However, the court does not provide any information about when a judgment can be expected in these proceedings.