Objections to the draft zoning plan of Liberec will be possible to submit from next week

Liberec – Liberec has completed the draft of a new zoning plan, which the representatives should approve by the end of this year. Objections to the draft can be submitted starting next Monday. A public discussion will take place online on May 31. CTK was informed of this today by Mayor Jaroslav Zámečník (Starostové pro Liberecký kraj).

"Otherwise, we would risk not meeting the established conditions for its conduct," said the mayor. Due to anti-coronavirus measures, mass gatherings are limited, and no one currently knows what rules will apply at the end of May. Therefore, not all interested parties might be able to attend the repeated public discussion in person. According to the mayor, the city will allow people who do not have access to a computer to follow the discussion on a screen in the meeting room of the Liberec town hall.

The validity of the current zoning plan for Liberec will expire in 2022. The city has been working on creating a new plan, which should regulate the development of the fifth largest city in the country over the next 20 to 30 years, since 2007. Interested parties will be able to familiarize themselves with the current draft of the new zoning plan, which has been modified since the last public discussion in June 2018, starting Monday, April 19, in office number 300 on the third floor of the historical town hall. It will also be displayed on the notice boards of the magistrate located in the windows on the ground floor of the New Magistrate building. Objections can be submitted until June 7. Comments can be made on the entire proposal, but only objections related to the changed sections since the previous public discussion will be evaluated. "If someone comments on the unchanged sections, they will automatically be rejected according to the rules. Otherwise, we would not be able to achieve our goal if the set of comments kept expanding; it must, on the contrary, shrink," stated the mayor.

Throughout the process of preparing the new zoning plan, the town hall received approximately 3,270 objections and comments, of which about 600 were submitted since the previous public discussion. "They were addressed with the same logic as the previous roughly 2,700 objections, and we accommodated about five percent of them, which, however, do not significantly influence anything. Since 2018, there have been no significant developments," said Zámečník. The current administration does not want to make more substantial changes to the draft created under the previous city leadership precisely to ensure that the new zoning plan can be adopted as quickly as possible. The mayor expects the representatives to approve it by the end of this year.

The opposition criticizes the draft of the new zoning plan, arguing that in many cases it goes against what the residents want. An example is the creation of an industrial zone next to the airport in Ostašov or the conversion of so-called mixed-use areas to industrial zones, which will affect the city parts of Vesec and Doubí. The new zoning plan will also not include a second transport connection for the industrial and commercial zone Sever, which the city leadership advocated. The reason for this is the disapproving stance of the Ministry of Transport, as the connection to the bypass would be too close to the current connection of the zone. This would contradict the standards for first-class roads.