When a municipality plans a street, a school or a kindergarten, it is stuck in a tight corset of procurement regulations imposed by the bureaucracy.

This makes construction projects not only expensive, but also time-consuming.

This is particularly problematic when buildings are needed quickly due to increased demand - such as day-care centers.

The city of Griesheim near Darmstadt is now taking a different approach that is unique in Hesse.

It has not yet been clarified whether she might lose state subsidies as a result.

In any case, other municipalities have already expressed an interest in this special approach.

The law stipulates that the planning services must first be tendered for construction projects.

And throughout Europe.

Months or even years pass before the offers are received, checked and awarded.

And only when the planning work has been completed can the actual construction work be put out to tender.

Again all over Europe, which again takes months or years until an order is finally placed.

That is why public construction projects often take many years from the idea to completion.

Then it can happen that the individual trades are assigned to several companies.

If one of these companies goes bankrupt, which happens again and again, the construction work comes to a halt.

Not only are they delayed, they are also getting more and more expensive.

Griesheim's mayor, Geza Krebs-Wetzl (CDU), together with lawyer Harald Nickel, who teaches European public procurement law at Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences, searched for a better solution.

Krebs-Wetzl did not want to see why public building projects are significantly more expensive than private buildings because of the excessive bureaucracy and legal requirements and why they take far too long.

Why not leave planning and construction in one hand?

And why award the contracts to several companies when one can do both?

These were questions that Krebs-Wetzl wanted to clarify.

plan and construction

On behalf of the city, Nickel explored the possibilities with the regional council in Kassel, which is responsible for the award procedure, and received a few rebuffs before the somewhat different, but much faster procedure was approved.

Whether there are also grants for this is still unclear, the mayor told the press.

It is still being checked whether there is a pot for such procedures.

Specifically, it is about a new day-care center with seven groups.

A company from Georgsmarienhütte with a branch in Neu-Isenburg had the right concept.

The company not only plans, but also has the option of speeding up construction because it uses ready-made modules that it produces itself.

There is no longer building stone on stone, which always leads to fluctuations in quality, but the modules are produced in a hall and then set up on site within a few weeks.

Before that, experts from the city sat down with the construction company and discussed the requirements, partially aligning them with what the company can manufacture and supply itself.

This meant that there were no planning costs, the construction time is significantly reduced, and the costs, estimated at around ten million euros, can be reduced by up to 35 percent, even though the day-care center meets the latest requirements and is being built to the passive house standard.

The energy consumption should be 15 kilowatt hours per square meter and year.

And there is financial security, because the construction company, which has built around 30 daycare centers to this standard, including one in Flörsheim, guarantees a fixed price.

The planning application for the day-care center is to be submitted in three weeks, and the building should be ready for occupancy in a little over twelve months, provided that the planning application does not lie with the responsible authorities for too long.

After the construction project, now known as the "Griesheim model", became public, the mayor of Griesheim received some support from mayors from other municipalities, including Bad König.

They were impressed by the model and wanted to implement it.

All you have to do is clear the bureaucratic hurdles that stand in the way of the simple and effective construction process.