The colleagues from the Economy Committee met for a short meeting on 23 September 2019 directly before the bdla seminar "Consequences of the ECJ ruling for the application of the HOAI" in Berlin.

It was necessary to determine the contents for the next bdla business forum on 3 March 2020 in Kassel. In Kassel, it will be about the awarding practice in the professional field (with the legal advisor Dr. Schattenfroh and competent colleagues from the association) as well as controlling in the landscape architecture office. The topics of awarding contracts and controlling will then lead to useful supplementary management in the planning office. Last but not least, a look will be taken at the risks posed by and precautionary strategies against cyber attacks on office servers.

The recently initiated infringement proceedings in connection with the calculation of the contract value for planning services were also discussed. The EU Commission is directly attacking the relevant provision of Section 3 (7) sentence 2 VgV, according to which several lots for planning services are only to be added together if the services are of the same kind.

The EU Commission is of the opinion that the contract values of planning services related to a project should generally be added together. This would lead to a significant increase in EU-wide tenders in this area, as the threshold value of currently 221,000 euros would then be reached for almost every project.

The Federal Chamber of Architects, together with the AHO and the Federal Chamber of Engineers, has written a joint letter to the Federal Minister of Economics, Peter Altmaier, in favour of retaining the existing regulation. Many architects' associations consider the potential effects to be problematic. In the working group, it became clear that the competences and capacities of the public sector in particular are likely to be affected.

Source: bdla association magazine "Landschaftsarchitekten" 4/2019

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