Pressure mounts to speed Prague's permitting process

There's so much project documentation involved needed in the Czech Republic that when submitting materials for approval "we have to bring it to the construction office with a truck." Those are the words of Dušan Kunovský, director of the Czech residential developer Central Group. He was speaking with idnes.cz, which writes that despite the strong economic boom, the Czech construction is stagnating. Kunovský said it will take years for the complete recodification of the construction law to take effect, but suggests that simplifying the documentation needed could be completed in just a few months. All it requires, he urges, is for the Ministry of Regional Development to issue a decree. The ministry would welcome the Czech Chamber of Architecture coming to an agreement with the Czech Chamber of Engineers on a simplified version of the crucial documentation, at least for residential projects.

There's still hope for progress over the issue of creating a main construction office for the City of Prague. At the moment, there are 22 of them, one for each district. The result is that there are 22 different approaches in the Czech capital, none of which are time effective. Prague's ruling coalition agreed on the need to create a single office before the elections, but fissures in the agreement have emerged. A compromise in which only the largest projects would be handled by the new main construction office is currently being debated. Deputy mayor for development Petr Hlaváček warns that failure to increase the flow of construction permits could end up the way it did in Milan, where the national government eventually intervened and took over control of the process.