A total of 340 proposals were submitted to the building law in the parliamentary committees

photo: FCB Karla Šlechtová

Prague - Around 340 amendments to the government bill on the building act, which primarily aims to allow the merger of territorial and building procedures as well as the assessment of the environmental impact of buildings, were gathered in parliamentary committees. This was stated today at a parliamentary seminar on the bill by the Minister for Regional Development, Karla Šlechtová (for ANO). The text of her introductory speech was provided to ČTK by the MMR press department. The aim of the bill is mainly to simplify and speed up the permitting of constructions.

According to the minister, the submitted proposals reflect an effort to change the laws that impose obligations on builders to obtain separate permits, various exemptions, or binding opinions. Some proposals the minister considers successful. For example, it is the possibility for the building authority to allow a change in the territorial decision not only if the spatial planning documentation has changed but also if other documents for issuing the original territorial decision have changed.

However, she disagrees with a number of other amendments, such as shifting the deadline for the validity of old spatial plans from December 31, 2020, to the end of 2031. She also disagrees with the proposal for stricter permitting of religious buildings of certain churches and religious societies.

One of the main proposed changes in the bill is the possibility to merge the now separate territorial procedure, building procedure, and environmental impact assessment, known as EIA. They are to be merged into a coordinated permitting procedure. Such construction will be simultaneously located and permitted by one official decision. However, the merged procedure will not be mandatory; the investor will have the option to choose whether to utilize it or to proceed according to existing legal regulations.

The merger of building procedures will primarily be possible for constructions of railways, roads, highways, local roads, or water structures, as well as for constructions related to radioactive waste storage, oil pipelines, product pipelines, for electricity transmission networks, or for power plants with an installed capacity of 100 megawatts and above.

The minister also stated at the seminar that the bill does not affect the number of existing general building authorities. In the future, according to her, only a clarification of their administrative districts is expected through a regulatory decree.