Nice outside, but ugly inside?
Things are not quite as bad as this idiom suggests with the Wiesbaden town hall.
But the many years of renovation backlog can be seen in the rooms and in the corridors in many nooks and crannies.
Every citizen who visits the "quiet place" in the town hall on his walk through the city knows exactly what we are talking about here.
A refurbishment is inevitable: it is hard to imagine that the mayor of the Hessian state capital could reside anywhere else than directly opposite the state parliament.
Even if the historic building is now one of the smaller administrative offices in the city area.
A community like Wiesbaden needs a representative town hall that architecturally creates a close connection to one of the most important periods of the city's history.
Nevertheless, the Wiesbaden town hall suffered the same fate as many other public buildings in the state.
Once built and opened with great pomp, there is a lack of continuous care and modernization.
And once the renovation backlog is so obvious that investments become unavoidable, the costs escalate.
It seems unlikely that in the case of the town hall on Schlossplatz it will actually remain at the 76 million euros that at least the magistrate is willing to spend.
With the Walhalla theater ruins and the planned Rheinhöhe sports park, the city councilors have two major projects in mind, for which the costs are also increasing.
Nevertheless, the mayor cannot be contradicted when he points out that waiting any longer tends to increase the costs and that all other variants are by no means much cheaper.
In the case of Wiesbaden, there is also the cultural heritage.
Preserving this heritage appropriately is a duty.