The planning of urban development in this country has always been an unpleasant and somewhat unimportant topic for the rulers. Therefore, only 30 percent of all 264 municipalities have existing general development plans, every second is with an expired documentation and needs to be updated. In practice, for most of the country there is no concept of future demographic and economic development and resource use. All this leads to blockage of a number of key infrastructure projects and work without a comprehensive vision of how things should happen. The reason why in this country have there are no urban development plans for various settlements is quite trivial – they would limit the possibilities for abuse and thus keep the pressure on revenue (unofficial) to the pockets of local rulers.
The lack of general development plans hinders the absorption of millions of levs of Regional Development OP . This is more than BGN21 million provided as grant assistance for 36 of the biggest Bulgarian municipalities in preparing their integrated plans for urban reconstruction and development. The problem is that such strategic documents simply cannot be done without general development schemes because it is not clear where to build what.
Apart from the money under this programme, about a total sum of 63 million EUR from the European Regional Development Fund is also under question because of the sluggish actions of the municipal authorities. Money is allocated in a special holding fund, managed by the Joint European Support for Sustainable Investment in City Areas (Joint European Support for Sustainable Investment in City Areas) – JESSICA, and these resources can be used to finance projects for parks, shopping malls, sports facilities and many more in the form of public-private partnerships. But to get the funds, municipalities must have integrated plans formulating long-term vision for urban development by 2020.
The worst is that the lack of such plans can ruin the financial programming throughout the next period: 2014-2020. According to EU requirements only project included in such plans can receive money from the Structural and Cohesion Funds for the period from 2014 to 2020. In other words, if local authorities miss the chance to act properly now, soon it may turn out that operational programmes are unavailable to them, and their promises for reconstruction and modernization of municipal infrastructure will become unfeasible.
However, mayors don’t seem to have rolled up their sleeves and work in this direction. Information in the Public Procurement Register shows that only Sofia, Silistra, Vratsa and Gabrovo have opened competitions to select a firm to establish an integrated plan, although the funding scheme under the Regional Development programme has been opened since June. Only a few municipalities, including Blagoevgrad, Pazardzhik and Burgas, are now preparing documentation and are likely to open such procedures by end of the year.
For the rest, the deadline in practice has come as the making of such a document requires between 12 and 18 months, followed by a mandatory public hearings and only then it is submitted for a vote in the municipal council. So it is unlikely that all such plans will be ready by the end of 2013 or if this does happen, it will definitely be at the expense of quality.
Although the procedure the Sofia Municipality was one of the first to open, it also leaves room for concern. The contract will probably not be awarded before the end of January next year, because the technical bids of the applicants will be opened on 15 December, and the price ones – a week later. In the best case the evaluation committee will rule in the days before New Year, then comes the two-week period for appeal, and if nobody challenges its decision in court, the contract will be inked. So the winner will have exactly 18 months available (the plan should be ready by June 23, 2013).
nbsp;
nbsp;
nbsp;
