The planned new government terminal at BER has finally come to an end. The federal government “will refrain from building a new protocol building” and will use the interim permanently as a government terminal, the Ministry of Finance announced on Friday on request. The “Tagesspiegel” had previously reported. The basis of the decision is the cost comparison of the Federal Agency for Real Estate Tasks on the question of “waiving or building a new protocol building”, the ministry said. Accordingly, the “waiver of the new protocol building has significant cost advantages”.
With interim, the ministry is referring to the temporary building that opened in October 2020 and has since served as the federal government’s air traffic terminal. The cost of constructing the building was around 70 million euros. According to earlier estimates, the new government terminal would have cost a multiple of this sum – the “Tagesspiegel” now reports more than half a billion euros.
In the past, the FDP had therefore repeatedly called for the construction of a new representative terminal to be abandoned. The Foreign Office in particular had stuck to the plans for a long time.
