The Flörsheim city politicians are fighting for their city forest.

They are also campaigning against gravel quarrying on the other side of the Main, at the Raunheimer Waldsee.

There, a company is planning a new mining area for silting.

On another area at the Raunheimer Waldsee, gravel is already being extracted for the construction industry.

Eleven hectares of forest are to be cleared for an expansion.

This area is not part of the Flörsheim district, i.e. not part of the city's sovereign territory, but falls under the jurisdiction of Raunheim in the Groß-Gerau district.

However, the forest in the planned mining area belongs to the city of Flörsheim - and they want to keep it.

Jan Schiefenhoevel

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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A resolution against gravel quarrying on the south side of the Main was passed with a large majority at the city council meeting on Tuesday evening.

The parliamentary groups of the CDU, the Green Alternative List Florsheim (GALF), the SPD and the group Die Freie Bürger (DFB) jointly submitted the application.

The FDP abstained, there were no opposing votes.

"Fight for Every Tree"

The topic has a special emotional meaning for Flörsheim because the city gave up a large part of its city forest decades ago - and not voluntarily.

The forest area at that time was needed for the construction of the West runway at Frankfurt Airport, as Peter Kluin from GALF said in his speech.

In protest against this, his constituency was founded in the 1980s.

Now the people of Flörsheim would have to defend themselves against the fact that another eleven hectares of forest were lost.

The argument for deforestation is that the trees there are in a desolate condition.

That is not correct.

In view of climate change, you have to “fight for every tree”.

Frank Herzog (DFB) said that earth should be "exploited" with gravel mining, and that should be prevented.

Werner Duchmann (FDP) held the opposite opinion.

The sand at the Raunheimer Waldsee is of good quality and hardly needs to be processed for use in construction.

That speaks for the dismantling.

One should take the chance to renew the forest at this point after deforestation.

The plan is to fill the pit after the gravel extraction and to reforest the area.

The SPD and FDP parliamentary groups submitted a second resolution together.

This was intended to protest against the gravel quarrying in Flörsheim's district, namely in the Weilbach gravel pit.

The second motion was not voted on; instead, a sentence was included in the first resolution that is directed against a new gravel quarry near Weilbach.

Gravel has been mined there for a long time, and the yield is used to renaturalize other parts of the gravel pit.

The protest is directed against a new area.

A dismantling on this new area is no longer planned, said Kluin and Marcus Reif (CDU).

That was decided last year.

The SPD should not unsettle the people of Flörsheim with other claims.