Application for European Capital of Culture 2025
Excess funds for second application phase
At its meeting today, Chemnitz City Council decided to provide 780,000 euros for the city's further application process for the title of European Capital of Culture 2025.
In March 2019, the city council agreed that the city of Chemnitz should undergo the entire selection process up to the award of the title of European Capital of Culture 2025 and submit the application book to the Kulturstiftung der Länder in Berlin in September 2019.
In December 2019, Chemnitz was recommended by the European jury for the final selection round. For this purpose, a second application book with the answers to the questions from the question catalogue of the second selection round must be prepared. The submission deadline was extended by two months due to the coronavirus pandemic.
In order to meet the requirements of the European jury, a new organisational structure for the Capital of Culture application was set up for the second application round. The team was expanded from March onwards in order to strengthen the topics of region, citizen participation and communication in addition to the extensive preparation of the second bid book.
According to the jury, Chemnitz needs to further elaborate its cultural and artistic vision and programme so that it becomes clear how the city's challenges (including the events in summer 2018) can be solved in concrete terms or more strongly on the basis of a Europe-oriented concept and in close cooperation with international partners. Accordingly, cooperation with European experts, programme developers and artists was expanded at the start of 2020.
The application process in the second phase is more extensive, more diversified and also longer than planned. The aforementioned increase in funding is an important prerequisite for completing the application process, which has grown to include international requirements, with a high chance of success.
The additional funds are available due to surpluses from the general and investment-related key allocations for 2020 that the City of Chemnitz received from the state of Saxony. The expected key allocations for 2020 were already planned in 2018 due to the two-year planning. At that time, the economic situation, population development and tax capacity of the City of Chemnitz as well as the total revenue could not yet be accurately estimated.
In addition, the so-called key mass of the Free State was increased compared to 2019 from the 2018 settlement. The key mass serves as the starting point for calculating the key allocations for the respective municipality.