Again made of wood, but not so shabby this time

Following some objections, the Hünenberg municipal council has presented the revised project for the asylum accommodation in the Bösch industrial area. It hopes that this will be the end of a long-running dispute.

The new asylum shelter in the Bösch industrial area will be a wooden building – as is also the case at the moment. But it will not be such a shabby one. This can be seen from the building application of the municipality of Hünenberg, which is available for viewing until 30 June. It provides visualisations of a three-storey building in wooden construction, with a rotary washing line for laundry and play equipment for children on the surrounding lawn. The three floors are structurally identical: each with five rooms, a kitchen, a common room, toilets and a laundry room.

It is a purpose-built building, and has even been described by the Cham architectural office commissioned with it as "unspectacular". The loan amount of CHF 1.4 million that was approved by the voters for new accommodation in 2015 will thereby not be exceeded, and this was the goal of the municipal council, which did not want to have to submit the revised project to the municipal assembly again.

The revision of the plans became necessary after objections, which were supported by the Zug Government Council (Regierungsrat), halted the original project. The opponents successfully relied on a building development plan that had been disregarded by the municipal council in the planning of the accommodation at that time. This plan has been designed for more people than the current one, as a result of the high number of refugees in 2015 and in the following years. A maximum of 36 asylum seekers are now to be accommodated in the Bösch in the future, although the Hünenberg municipal council probably expects that this maximum value will not be reached. In any case, the fire protection concept in the support documents provides for a maximum capacity utilisation of only 30 people.

A visualization of the planned accommodation in the edition documents.
Image: Raphael Biermayr (Hünenberg, 23 June 2021)
This is how the current accommodation still looks. The original 2015 project, which can be recognised from the construction profiles that were still standing here in September 2016, was not implemented.
Picture: Werner Schelbert

No additional emergency places planned
The authorities had exchanged views with the objectors before submitting the building application. This was done in order to be able to present a broadly-based project, with the hope of being able to implement the project this time. And construction is scheduled to start as quickly as possible, in October, with completion scheduled for March 2022 – 13 years after the first plans for a new asylum shelter in the municipality.

The cantonal social welfare office provided assistance to the municipal council in order to increase the acceptance of the new building. This is because no more emergency places are to be offered in the Bösch area, as the former director Jris Bischof told our newspaper last March. Emergency places are made available to rejected asylum seekers who have to leave Switzerland, and this can lead to explosive situations. There were even some police operations in the Bösch area a few years ago, mainly because of drug offences, and the accommodation has not been fully utilized since then.

The architect certifies that the new wooden building should have a service life of 30 years. Once this age has been reached, it would be exactly the same age as today's building, which was built in 1991.