Municipal construction between vision and reality

AI, digitalisation, tight budgets: What challenges does municipal road construction face and how does the tendering process work today?

The long road to a public construction contract

Municipal construction projects often have a bad reputation: repairs take too long, the most modern communication device is the fax and, of course, the street where the mayor lives is always the first to be renovated. Rafael Beier, head of the building and civil engineering department of the city of Nagold, tells us whether this is true.

The expert interview on municipal road construction

Rafael Beier, Head of the Building and Civil Engineering Office of the City of Nagold, provides practical insights into his work, the awarding of contracts and explains the opportunities that digitalisation brings for building administration and citizens.

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Contrary to the cliché: public authorities rely on AI

Right at the beginning of the interview, Beier makes it clear that many things in municipal building authorities today are very different from the usual clichés. AI is now an important part of everyday life in the building authorities. In Nagold, all of the roads are travelled with AI support. This automatically records all damage during the journey and categorises it. Orders for repairs can also be forwarded directly to the municipal building yard via the software.

Bureaucracy as an obstacle

Rafael Beier’s opinion on artificial intelligence is clear: ‘You have to use AI.’ However, the trained carpenter and civil engineer is also aware of the limits of AI and digitalisation. All too often, bureaucratic obstacles stand in the way of building authorities. For example, they are unable to use many services whose servers are not located in Germany. Data protection also often stands in the way of the exchange of information between authorities.

Trusting your own employees

However, there are also practical reasons against making full use of all the possibilities of digitalisation. Rafael Beier, for example, does not believe that too much control makes sense, even if it would be possible today thanks to digital communication channels. Instead, he favours giving local people the freedom to make decisions. He told us in an interview how he manages this balancing act and how he copes with the tight budget for construction tasks.

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Award by public tender

But before the city can realise a construction project, it must first be awarded. It is well known that special conditions apply to public sector clients. However, a lot has changed here too in recent years. The days when all contractors turned up at the civil engineering office at 10 o’clock in the morning to submit tenders are long gone. Today, contracts are awarded electronically.

What criteria apply when awarding public construction contracts?

Despite these developments in the award process, the digitalisation of a company is not yet a criterion for awarding a construction contract. The same applies to sustainability. The reason for this is quite simple: ‘Sustainability cannot be measured,’ says Rafael Beier. But he is also convinced that this will change in the near future. The pioneers in this development are the Scandinavian countries, where sustainability has been an important criterion in the awarding of public construction contracts for a number of years.

This is how the city decides where to build

But where should it actually be built? In times of tight budgets, this is not such an easy decision. Rafael Beier has to make do with an annual budget of 30 cents per square metre in Nagold. At the same time, residents often have the impression that refurbishments are carried out far too late. Find out in the interview why this is usually not true and – as some citizens suspect – whether the streets where a local councillor lives are really favoured (spoiler: no).

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