(Podgorica, 21 June 2011) – MANS today called on the Parliament of Montenegro to reject suggested amendments to the Law on Spatial Planning and Construction. The amendments to the law introduced by Podgorica mayor Miomir Mugoša would allow the total monopolization of planning and construction decisions at the local level without sufficient control at the state level.
Mugoša as an MP submitted several amendments that seek to alter the law, the most controversial of which relates to proposed amendments granting municipalities greater power in issuing building permits, communicating with investors and the realization of planning documents.
Specifically, Mugoša’s proposal implies that the local secretariats for urban planning would now issue building and usage permits for all residential and commercial buildings, regardless of their dimensions. The current law limits the right of municipalities to regulate facilities up to 3,000 m2 in gross building area. Additionally, Mugoša suggested that municipalities should now have the right to issue permits for the building of education, science and health facilities, again without specifying any limitations on the objects in question.
Mugoša justified these amendments in terms of the general attempt to decentralize responsibilities from the state to the municipal level, as well as consolidating the services that investors can obtain at the local level.
In legally coherent states such amendments would be recognized as a logical move towards more efficient and cost effective procedures for obtaining permits and removing business barriers. However, when these amendments are contextualized by considering their main proponent, and the general record of local authorities in these matters, there are more than sufficient grounds for expressing concern about what these proposals would actually mean on the ground.
The current capacity of municipalities to consistently apply the law in this area are very limited, especially given the massive influence that mayor’s have in finalizing such decisions. This is confirmed by numerous legal violations that MANS has uncovered over the years and confirmed by the proceedings against Budva mayor Rajko Kuljača in the Zavala case. Furthermore, two of the three secretary’s for urbanism in the national capital Podgorica gave faced criminal charges filed by MANS in recent years, precisely for abusing their official position in this realm.
Additionally, Montenegrin practice in this realm is characterized by serious conflicts of interest in which mayors have their own construction companies, planning firms, own land in attractive locations, maintain formal and informal links with construction industry tycoons, and have at their disposal a number of obedient planners and architects.
It’s really not that difficult to imagine what the issuing of construction permits would look like if we only considered the example of Bar Municipality, where mayor Žarko Pavičević owns his own construction and planning firm, which also does supervision of local construction projects. At the same time, as the mayor, Pavičević has the authority to initiate changes to planning documents. If Pavičević also held in his back pocket the authority to issue construction permits for residential-commercial facilities, his influence over property and construction would be total – while the opportunities for abuse would be unlimited.
We believe that the amendments proposed by Miomir Mugoša would be a very bad solution if we consider the fact that decentralization would lead to even greater centralization of authority at the local level. This would open the door for those mayor’s who only differ from their former colleague Kuljača in their location.
With this, the small amount of control at the state level will significantly increase the space for corruption since potential investors will focus their ‘attention’ only at the local level; increasing the enormous pressure that exists locally.
For this reason, MANS calls on Montenegro’s MPs to reject these controversial amendments, given that the current capacity to implement the law at the local level such alterations only stand to do more harm than good.
MANS
