Three building yards were merged to form “city maintenance”.

The 82,000-inhabitant town of Dessau-Roßlau in Saxony-Anhalt, for example, has long called its building yard “city maintenance”. Now Amstetten has also introduced the Prussian name as the first city in Austria for its newly built central building yard. “Construction and business yard – that was simply no longer true,” said Mayor Christian Haberhauer (VP), explaining his discomfort with the old logo, “the city isn’t building anything in that sense, and it doesn’t make a profit in this area either.” So in the major project to combine the three outdated building yards in the districts of Ulmerfeld-Hausmening, Mauer and Preinsbach into a new building, an advertising agency was also involved for a new name. They put the proposal on the table to rename it “Stadtpflege”, which the staff also liked. “This corresponds to the understanding as a service company for the population,” says Haberhauer.

At the opening of the futuristic industrial building on the site of a former gravel pit directly on the federal highway, Haberhauer thanked all city hall factions, but deliberately left out the SPÖ in his thanks. This abstained from voting on the decision for the 15 million euro construction project for cost reasons and due to a different opinion on the location issue. “A strange expression of how the mayor understands cooperation,” replied Baustadtrat Bernhard Wagner (SP), who, like deputy mayor Gerhard Riegler (SP), was invited and present as a guest of honor.

Synergies are undisputed

Debates in the town hall aside, the new central building yard and the “Stadtpflege”, whose lettering had already been re-labeled on most of the vehicles, from the 120 meter long garages to the mechanic and carpenter’s workshops to the high-bay warehouse and the new silo for salt spreading, presented themselves as Future-proof overall building. The premises were deliberately made one size larger, so the current 80 employees now have a lot of space. However, the new “city maintenance” is aimed at a capacity of 130 employees in a city that is constantly growing. “We don’t want to end up in the unfortunate situation where the business is bursting at the seams again,” explains Haberhauer. The SP also admitted that merging three construction yards into one facility brings synergies and saves enormous costs for the new “city maintenance”, which also supplies itself with clean energy with a huge PV system and a wood chip heating system. However, “longer journeys” are a downer, said Wagner.