Sale of the Capa Wood: Left-wing group could give its approval – subject to two conditions

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Things are set to get interesting at the council meeting on 1 July: will the council administration succeed in its bid to sacrifice the small wood on Capastraße so that RB Leipzig can have the training pitches promised in the agreement and the Kleinmesse can remain at its current site? The council had actually promised to look for a new site for the Kleinmesse elsewhere in the city.

To date, there has been no official report on the outcome of this search. Instead, there has been a surprising move by the Property Office to sell the site on Capastraße to RB Leipzig. The Left-wing faction appears to be in favour of this.

Last week, the city leadership announced that it had found a “solution for keeping the Kleinmesse at its traditional site, which takes into account the interests of the fairground operators as well as those of RB Leipzig and environmental and nature conservation”. The council plans to offer the club the area to the west of the existing fairground – a small urban woodland covering 5.7 hectares that has grown over the past 30 years. It is an important biotope and a cooling feature of the landscape, situated right next to one of the areas of the city that gets the hottest in summer.

From the perspective of the Left Party faction on the city council, however, retaining the Kleinmesse site on Cottaweg is crucial.

Greater certainty for the Kleinmesse

“The dispute over the Kleinmesse has now been going on for several years. A long-term solution is finally needed. Last year, our group succeeded in tabling an amendment to the leasehold agreement to make a binding location for the fairground – well-connected, fully developed and accessible – a condition,” the Left Party group now comments on its position regarding the administrative proposal submitted by the Property Office on 10 June.

“The proposal now to be decided upon is the result of this review: apparently, no other site has been found that meets the conditions. Consequently, we must take a fresh look at how the conflicts over the sites can be resolved.”

The only question is: why does this have to be decided by the City Council at the eleventh hour before the summer recess? Who suddenly no longer has time to scrutinise the administration’s decision?

“The purpose of the policy resolution now being tabled is to grant the city a mandate to negotiate,” confirms Franziska Riekewald, chair of the Die Linke group on the city council. But she also emphasises the condition under which the Die Linke group will give its consent: “We will do so only on the following condition: the Kleinmesse must be guaranteed for at least 20 years and, above all, on a continuous basis. As things stand, the proposal states that the Kleinmesse can take place once RB has brought its car park into operation. That still leaves many questions unanswered.”

Compensation – but where?

And there is another condition that must be met from the Left Party’s perspective, emphasises Susanne Scheidereiter, the group’s spokesperson on climate and the environment: “The question of how the woodland will be dealt with is also essential. If it is to be cleared, something must be done for nature in return: at the Elsterbecken, for example, renaturation measures have long been under discussion. We expect RB Leipzig to commit to nature conservation in the area surrounding the stadium. It won’t work without investments that benefit the people of Leipzig.”

But it is precisely the two points raised by Riekewald and Scheidereiter that remain unresolved. In fact, both are arguments for not approving the administration’s proposal and instead instructing it to clarify precisely these issues: securing the continued operation of the Kleinmesse exhibition centre and tangible, quantifiable compensation measures – not somewhere beyond the city limits, but directly in the vicinity of the Elster Basin, which is long overdue for restoration.