Vienna to hand out restaurant vouchers

In order to support the local restaurants to get started once they are allowed to open up again on 15 May, the city of Vienna announced yesterday that they’d hand out vouchers to all ~950,000 households with a value of 25 EUR for single-person and 50 EUR for multi-person households. The only catch seems to be that you are not allowed to use it to buy alcoholic drinks.

Great idea! Now I just wish that every city in Austria would do something like this. That being said, Vienna has (for now) reserved 43,000,000 EUR for that campaign. If Graz would give out a voucher of 25 EUR to every person living here (~290,000) , it would cost around 7,250,000 EUR. To put that in perspective: This year’s budgets for the renovations of Liebenauer Hauptstraße and for the “Lebensraum Mur” project (Finanzplanung 2020-2024 Stand VA 2020 Beilagen für die Beschlüsse, p. 23) combined would be about the same amount of money, so that would be quite an investment.

Yesterday, the city of Graz also announced that they have to cancel one of their bigger projects due to budget issues thanks to the current health crisis. Whether or not that’s really the reason for the budget issue, it sounds like Graz simply doesn’t have the money right now 😕