Seated under a suspended ceiling, in front of a white, bare wall, Paul van Meekeren looks at his screen. The alderman for Sustainability (D66) van Purmerend sees and hears how the councilors of the Noord-Holland municipality get their turn one by one in the digital meeting. They vote on his plans for further making the Overwhere-Zuid district gas-free. It took a long time, but now it’s finally here.
It is Thursday, April 22, 2021, and the proposal now before the city council has been delayed for months. The Purmerend district is participating in the Natural Gas Free Neighborhoods Program (PAW) of the Ministry of the Interior to investigate how the Dutch ‘built environment’ can get rid of gas.
The municipality has received a subsidy of 7.3 million euros from the government for its ‘testing ground’ and is regarded as a forerunner. In October 2019, Purmerend was the first to disconnect existing private homes in a pilot district from gas. That first phase was a triumph: 88 homes were made natural gas-free.
A year later revealed NRC However, the project was temporarily halted. While the work to disconnect the other more than 1,100 buildings in the district should have already started, it was quiet on the street in Overwhere-Zuid. Causes: high costs, lack of money and problems with planning.
Also read: Suddenly there was a letter: for the time being your neighborhood will not go off gas
The news almost cost Van Meekeren his head. Councilors were angry that they had to learn of the delay from the media. The motion of no confidence that was tabled against him was supported by the entire opposition.
The alderman then said in November that he would come up with an evaluation of the first phase of the project and an implementation strategy for the second phase. November turned into December, and once the official reports were published, the scheduled debate was postponed to April 2021.
On this Thursday evening, the council will vote on Van Meekeren’s proposal. It was passed by a vote of 28 to 8.
This means that the promising project can finally continue. The first deadline immediately dawns. By September 28, Van Meekeren has promised, 85 percent of the residents whose homes are nominated to be made natural gas-free must have agreed to the municipal plans. If it is less, the alderman must again consult with the council.
Also read: Purmerend continues with natural gas-free project – despite budget deficit
It turns out to be too tight a schedule. On September 14 of this year, Van Meekeren registers an update to the council that “this deadline has been chosen very carefully. In consultation with and at the request of the partners […] we have therefore extended the preparation period until January 31, 2022”. The alderman puts forward the corona crisis as the main reason, which makes contact with residents about their living situation and the appropriate natural gas-free options difficult.
However, Van Meekeren knew much earlier that he would not meet the new deadline. That’s what (former) officials say to NRC, who spoke to four of them and was able to view internal communications. The administrative apparatus of the Noord-Holland municipality warned the alderman last year to take more time for the continuation of the project, preferably a year. Instead, it became five months, according to his officials, because Van Meekeren wanted to make a good turn in the run-up to the approaching municipal elections. Due to a municipal reclassification, these are scheduled for November 24.
Project leader inactive
The clash between the alderman and his officials led, among other things, to the resignation of a new project leader last June, the officials whose names are known to the editors. He was on the job for only four months before being sent off because he said the project couldn’t be completed any faster.
The project leader was right, says one of his ex-colleagues. “Residents are not able to make a good decision about turning off the gas in a few months. And you depend on that. This was never going to work.”
But the alderman did not want to hear that, says another. “The resignation was a political reckoning.”
The project leader himself, Paul Stolzenburg, says that he has been suspended “because the alderman did not agree with my approach”. Stolzenburg wanted to professionalize the project, but that was not appreciated, he says. “I concluded that the financial management and the planning of the project are not in order, and that there was no transparent communication about the spending of taxpayers’ money. It is basically a useful social project, but in practice it mainly served to keep the alderman politically in the saddle.”
Van Meekeren does not want to comment on the dismissal because it is a “personal matter”, he writes. He does write that the upcoming municipal elections are “entirely outside this or any other project”. According to him, the schedule has been determined in consultation with the partners involved. „We went there [vijf maanden voor 28 september] assuming this date was feasible.”
Connection costs
Dissatisfaction within Purmerend’s official organization is not only about the dismissal of Stolzenburg and the unfeasible planning. Several officials have great difficulty with the implementation strategy, which they consider unrealistic. For example, there are the high costs of connecting the homes to the heat network in the municipality. According to two officials, those costs for 85 homes in the completed first phase amounted to more than 1 million euros. This has not been communicated to the city council.
The only thing that the municipality reports about it is that District Heating Purmerend (SVP), the company responsible for the heat network and of which the municipality is the sole shareholder, has paid these costs. It is not possible to find out exactly how much money is involved. However, the implementation strategy stipulates that SVP will receive 373,000 euros in the continuation of the project for expenditure already incurred, and also receive a contribution from the municipality for future connection costs. These costs are estimated at almost 4 million euros.
The officials fear that the follow-up phase will turn out to be much more expensive than budgeted, while the budget of the project already shows a deficit of more than 1 million euros. “The [aansluitkosten van de pilotwijk] are much higher than communicated. The [rest van het project] is many times greater in terms of housing numbers, this worries me,” one of them wrote to NRC.
Van Meekeren refers to the SVP for connection costs. “Questions about their costs are not for me to answer.” He calls the contribution to SVP for connection costs “fully in line with the purpose of the government grant”. SVP was asked for a response on Monday, after the alderman referred to the company, but has not responded.
Civil servants are also concerned about the average connection costs included in the budget. An official from the finance department thinks it is premature to mention those amounts. “We gradually learn how those costs come about, but they still change every day. All kinds of assumptions about costs are made too quickly. We should not have mentioned them as a final figure, but in a range.”
According to Van Meekeren, the budget is not based on the average connection costs per home: “The estimate is (ultimately) expressed in the average costs per home. As far as I’m concerned, this is no more than a presentation issue,” he writes.
In the execution strategy states that all figures are ‘global’. Nevertheless, the project budget is based on total costs, which are the result of the average connection costs multiplied by the number of homes. According to Van Meekeren, the fact that a project is substantiated with millions of euros of subsidy with so little certainty is part of a testing ground. “Obviously, this project is surrounded by many uncertainties.”
Also read: Making city and village natural gas-free: it turns out to be a difficult process
Lifted over elections
Officials are also still astonished at the decision to postpone some important decisions. “It has been decided not to include certain matters in the implementation strategy,” says one of them. As an example, he mentions the financing of sustainability measures after the subsidy pot of the project is empty. Now the plan is to stop the project when the subsidy money has been used up.
“You can’t do that to the residents in the neighborhood who don’t get their turn before that time,” says the official. “People have been anticipating for years that their homes will run off gas. Then you can’t suddenly say that you have to pay 10,000 euros to make your house natural gas-free.”
According to him, the upcoming municipal elections will again play a role here. “As we say in municipal land: if you do not understand a decision, then it is political. You don’t want to have a discussion about such a hot topic as a personal contribution just before the elections.”
A policy document called Transitievisie Warmte is ready with plans for after the living lab, Van Meekeren responds, but the city council has not yet adopted it. The residents have been explicitly informed that the project will stop when the money runs out, the alderman writes. “There is no rest of the project after the living lab.” The city council has also determined that it should not cost residents anything, he writes. “If residents make preparations themselves, they do so of their own choice.”
In the meantime, the Purmerend Gasvrij project is only experiencing further delays. Making all 1,276 homes in Overwhere-South natural gas-free by 2022 will not be achieved, as it became clear last year. Not a big deal, said Alderman Van Meekeren at the time, “because I think it’s about getting rid of gas by 2050”.
In the meantime, it will take until at least the spring of 2022 before the work of the second phase can start, if enough residents participate.
According to Van Meekeren, Purmerend still has the ambition to make the entire municipality natural gas-free. But little is left of the municipality’s wish to set a shining example in the energy transition, says one of its officials. “Purmerend no longer wants to be a forerunner. The municipality wants to return to the shelter of the middle group.”
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