The municipal eco-account is used to manage compensation and replacement measures that have become necessary as a result of ecological intervention.
The interests of nature conservation and landscape management must be taken into account when drawing up any development plan. Compensation and replacement measures must be created in accordance with the Federal Nature Conservation Act for construction measures that entail ecological intervention. With the amendment of the Building Code in 1998, it is now possible to implement compensatory and replacement measures in advance, independently of the planned intervention, and to allocate them to an intervention later if necessary.
As part of the municipal eco-account, areas were compiled in a compensation area pool that are suitable for compensation from a nature conservation perspective. Compensation measures that have already been implemented can be held in an "eco-account" and allocated to an intervention if required. The stockpiling of compensation areas relieves and speeds up the urban land-use planning process.
The land pool is managed using the GeoAs-Ökokonto geoinformation system. The city administration always has an overview of which compensation and replacement areas have already been allocated to construction projects, which areas and measures are still available for compensation and where further action is required. Compensation and replacement measures that have been implemented are credited to the eco-account, while measures required to compensate for interventions are debited. The advance payments made by the city can be refinanced in accordance with Section 135 of the German Building Code.
Areas are selected from the compensation area pool and the proposed measures, for example the creation of a new orchard, are carried out by the city. If the land is not already municipal land, it must be purchased or contractual arrangements must be made for its use. The professional maintenance of the areas must also be ensured by the city. The measure is "paid into" the eco-account as a "credit".
If the need to establish a compensatory or replacement measure arises when a development plan is drawn up as part of the land-use planning process, this credit can be used.
The ecologically enhanced area is allocated to the intervention prepared by the development plan, for example new building plots, and thus "debited" from the eco-account.
The costs for the preliminary work carried out by the municipality can now be claimed from the developer, for example the individual building owner, on the basis of the statutes of the town of Bad Homburg v.d.Höhe for the collection of cost reimbursement amounts in accordance with Section 135a of the German Building Code.
The term "eco-account" therefore essentially refers to the storage of measures for compensation as part of the impact regulation in urban land-use planning.
