The magistrate is overwhelmed with comments on the Metropolitan Plan

Prague - The city council department currently records about 1700 submissions with comments on the proposal for the new Prague zoning plan, and more are still coming in. Today marks the end of the opportunity to submit comments for the first round of public discussion of the Metropolitan Plan. Submissions may contain multiple suggestions, and in the case of city districts, even hundreds. This was reported to ČTK by the council spokesperson Vít Hofman.

According to him, officials are three days behind in recording, and the total number of submissions should be known within three weeks. More detailed and precise data will only be available after sorting, which will take several months. The Metropolitan Plan, which is to determine construction in Prague from 2023, is criticized by most city districts and numerous other institutions.

"At this moment, the number of suggestions has no informative value. From experience, we know that the greatest increase in delivered comments occurs in the last days, and we do not yet have all submissions recorded," Hofman stated. Today, people can still send comments by mail, which will arrive in the coming days.

In about three weeks, officials will know the total number of submissions. "However, this number can also be misleading, as it does not account for the number of commenters, duplicate submissions, and so on," the spokesperson noted.

More detailed sorting and recording of comments and their authors is estimated to take half a year. According to the schedule, the office should process, evaluate, and incorporate suggestions into the draft within two years, but it will depend on their number. The city Institute for Planning and Development (IPR), which prepared the draft plan, will assist officials with this.

Comments can be submitted by individuals, associations, companies, city districts, and other institutions. Suggestions from councils and public institutions often take the form of so-called fundamental comments, which will have to be addressed by the Prague city council individually during discussions. Comments from individuals or companies will be approved in bulk by councilors based on the recommendations of officials, considering their number. When approving the existing zoning plan, which came into effect in 2000, 16,000 comments were submitted.

After processing comments from the first round of discussions, a second round will follow, which could ideally take place in 2020. According to the current schedule, the new zoning plan should come into effect in 2023. Initially, it was supposed to take effect in 2020, but the councilors extended the period by three years.

The zoning plan is a key document that determines where construction is permitted in the city and to what extent. There have been disputes surrounding the new zoning plan in the past, which led to the resignation of Petr Hlaváček from the helm of IPR and temporarily also the main author of the new plan, Roman Koucký. Ultimately, he returned to head the team preparing the plan after winning the competitive selection.