Ministerstvo wants to push through another change to the building code before the elections

Prague - The Ministry of Transport will attempt to push through changes to the building law before the elections to accelerate the construction of large infrastructure projects. The office aims to use expedited proceedings and advocate for the amendment in the Chamber of Deputies during the first reading. This was stated by Minister of Transport Dan Ťok at today's Žofín Forum.

Preparations for large constructions take on average more than ten years. The ministry is trying to implement a simplified procedure that would allow the merging of the ecological project assessment (EIA), zoning, and building permits into one process.

According to the president of the Confederation of Industry and Transport Jaroslav Hanák, however, it is not possible to make such a change to the law before the autumn elections even in the case of expedited procedures. Recently, the confederation identified the amendment to the building law as a priority for the next government.

In the latest amendment to the building law, which was recently approved by the Chamber, Hanák stated that two things were achieved. First, citizens' obligations for reporting ordinary constructions were simplified and, at the same time, the possibilities for activists to block construction projects were limited. Organizations from Valašsko, for example, will not be able to block construction in Ústí nad Labem, Hanák said.

However, this change did not significantly speed up the preparation of large infrastructure projects. The requirement for the permitting of construction to be handled by one office within a single procedure was also not fulfilled, Hanák added.

Hanák also pointed out the delays in the commencement of nine priority construction projects that should start being built this year. According to Ťok, ecological organizations complicate the situation for these projects. They plan to challenge government regulations that allowed these constructions to obtain EIA ecological assessments through expedited procedures. According to Ťok, some of these constructions may have to be decided by the courts.

Last year, the government approved a list of nine transportation constructions for which it will not be necessary to repeat the entire process of environmental impact assessment (EIA). There are problems with environmental assessments, which the EU does not want to recognize, for 98 transportation constructions in the Czech Republic worth approximately 130 billion crowns. These are old assessments prepared under the law from 1992, that is, before the Czech Republic joined the EU.