Working visit to Venlo pioneering project
Today, the Delta Commissioner met with a warm Limburg welcome as Mayor Antoin Scholten received him with coffee and pie in the Maaspoort municipal theatre on the bank of the river Meuse. As the inland hub for Rotterdam and a logistic transport hotspot, with the Ruhr Area and its 20 million inhabitants as its backyard, Venlo harbours great ambitions for the future.
In the presence of all the members of the Meuse Delta Programme steering group, Johan van den Hout, Chair of the steering group and member of the Provincial Executive of Noord-Brabant, looked back on the work carried out in the past few years, that has resulted in a broadly supported preferred strategy for the Meuse regarding the approach to the water safety issue. The elaboration of the preferred strategy, in which expansion of the rivers is combined with (urgent) dyke improvements, will lead to opportunities for area development along a variety of routes. Today’s schedule featured Venlo.
The administrative ownership of the Venlo area development lies with the city of Venlo, in close collaboration with all the parties involved.
Alderman Jos Teeuwen showed the delegates around and demonstrated where opportunities for integrated area development will be created by approaching the aggregate of harbour development, infrastructure (Meuse bridges), marina and logistics (shipping, road transport and railway transport) in connection with the water safety issue.
The Delta Commissioner commemorated the important work that has been accomplished and pointed out that there is still a great deal of work in store in the decades ahead. Collaboration, vision, coming out of the trenches, these are concepts that befit integrated area development and are in line with the working methods of the Delta Programme. The Delta Commissioner indicated that a programmed view over time may be helpful in this respect, considering that not everything can be tackled simultaneously.
Before the delegates set sail, Joris Tenhagen, Managing Director of Seacon Logistics Venlo, briefly sketched the historical perspective of the harbour development and outlined the ambitions and opportunities for the future.
The river provides a good view of how the construction along the Meuse has developed and how the bottleneck has in fact come into being. Work on an artist’s impression of a future perspective will start very soon.
The Delta Commissioner monitors the process with interest and is ready to offer assistance wherever necessary.