How Oberursel plans to increase childcare costs

June 10, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Oberursel's town hallTwo weeks ago I sat in on a meeting of the town council where the charges for Kindergarten places were discussed at length.  Now the town administration has come up with new proposals that will be put to the next town council meeting for approval.

It is worth taking a moment to look at the demands that parents had made a few months ago when the topic first arose.  Many of them have been fulfilled, such as keeping the Siblingbonus in place and not reducing the quality or number of places available in the town.

They also wanted the increase to take place in several steps, which is what will now happen.  The increases will take effect on 1st August 2012, 1st February 2012 and 1st August 2013.  However they insisted that the increase should be “moderate”.  The question is: what is moderate?

At the town council meeting some parties were more direct, and announced the highest percentage that they considered to be reasonable.

In the end, however, some people will end up with a larger increase than many wanted. [Read more…]

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How much should parents pay towards Kindergarten costs?

May 25, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Last night I went to my first ever Stadtverordnetenversammlung at Oberursel’s town hall.  Roughly speaking that’s probably best translated as “town council”, and the mixture of things being discussed reflects that.  Things like bus shelters, roads, budgets and planning permission.  In fact, it was the planning permission part that I was most interested in, as the Frankfurt International School and Mountain Lodge plans were on the Agenda.

Oberursel's town hallIn the end, there was little discussion about either of them.  Instead, over half of the time allowed was spent discussing the level of Kindergarten fees.

It was obviously a popular topic as well, as over half of the local residents who were watching from the public seating were still there when the debate started – and they were still there when time was called on the sitting at 11pm. [Read more…]

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Why Oberursel’s Hessentag deficit is larger than expected

February 15, 2012 By Leave a Comment

The big wheel at Oberusel's station

Last year the Hessentag in Oberursel took up quite a bit of the town’s resources and also was covered quite extensively on this blog.

Today the day arrived when one of the key questions after the event was answered: “how much did it all cost?”, or to be more precise – how big was the loss that the town’s finances have been left with.

The original budget was for a loss of 3½ million Euro.  In the end, it turned out to be 4½ million.  An addition €836,000 were spent by the town’s own service department (BSO) and €503,000 on personnel costs.  However these are not included in the deficit as to a certain extent they would have been spent anyway on the normal day-to-day running of services in the town.

So what went wrong? [Read more…]

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