Brno and other cities have comments on the amendment to the building act

Brno – Large cities, such as Brno, Prague, or Ostrava, are preparing a joint statement to comment on the draft of the upcoming building law. Brno's Mayor Markéta Vaňková said this to reporters today. According to her deputy Petra Hladíka, the law is poorly written and could even be unconstitutional. For example, Brno criticizes the proposal for taking away cities' primary role in preparing the urban plan.

The amendment to the building law is supposed to expedite and simplify the approval of constructions. The government approved the draft of the law in the middle of the year, with a schedule counting on its validity starting from 2021. According to the Ministry for Regional Development, which is presenting the law, the approval process for constructions should be reduced from the current five years to one year.

Comments can be submitted until December 23. Brno, Prague, Ostrava, Plzeň, and Liberec will submit them together, Vaňková said. The representatives of the cities have been negotiating since June.

According to Hladík, the proposal is poorly written. "We all want to cooperate and to build, but developers wrote it for themselves, and it’s not good. In this case, we say it’s better to have nothing than something in this form,” Hladík stated.

According to Brno's councilor for urban planning Filip Chvátal (KDU-ČSL), the proposal will tear away the role of self-governance from urban planning. "For Brno and Prague, this is fundamental because we are working on the urban plan, and halfway through the period, we would lose our main role as the preparer of the urban plan,” Chvátal said.

The proposed law aims to establish a unified system of state building administration, headed by a newly created Supreme Building Office, which is not under any ministry. "We don’t even know who should be in it. It wouldn’t even be under the control of the ministry,” Chvátal added. According to Hladík, it is the city's right to determine how the city will develop, where, for example, apartments or playgrounds will be built.