City of Skopje opens tender for ten‑year management plan for Vodno

The City of Skopje has opened a public tender running until tomorrow for the preparation of a ten-year management plan for the protected Vodno area, budgeting 2,118,644 denars, or slightly more than €34,000 excluding VAT. The plan will include an operational programme and — if selected — must be adopted by the City Council of Skopje after the Ministry of Environment gives its consent.

According to the call, the management plan must be produced using an interdisciplinary approach and in cooperation with relevant institutions and stakeholders. The document is expected to define measures and activities for the protection and sustainable development of Vodno's natural resources, and to set clear management objectives.

The tender text requires that the plan comply with the Spatial Plan of the Republic of Macedonia and applicable legislation. It must contain prescribed measures for nature protection, safeguarding ecologically important areas, preserving biological diversity and habitats, measures and activities for fire and disaster protection, and cartographic depictions of natural habitats. A public hearing on the draft is also foreseen.

Local controversies over draft urban plans

Voicing concern about construction on Vodno, the dean of the Faculty of Civil Engineering, Josif Josifovski, said: "The risk study is the only guarantee for safety when building on Vodno."

Recent public debate was fuelled by a draft detailed urban plan (DUP) for the Barutana area on Vodno. The city warned the draft could allow roughly twenty additional buildings on the slope, while the citizens' initiative Shansa za Centar has accused the draft of contradicting the General Urban Plan and ignoring erosion risks. The initiative criticised the proposal in strong terms, claiming it would open the way to extensive tree felling, road cuts and even the relocation of a major water pipe to facilitate new luxury houses.

Shansa za Centar said: "They adopted a draft plan for an area influenced by erosion without an opinion from the Directorate for Protection and Rescue. They adopted a draft plan that contains no measures on how to protect the area from potential erosion. They adopted a draft plan by which, besides the existing 15 objects, another 25 objects will be built, each of which can have 4 residential units (meaning each may house 4 families and have at least 4 vehicles). A draft plan by which the municipality will spend more money to cut a road through the hill and cut decades-old forest that should protect the city and to relocate a main water pipeline to allow construction of haciendas from the fees it will collect from building permits (meaning all citizens of Centar will pay for this clearing of part of the mountain to their own potential detriment). And for that plan Gerasimovski says it introduced order!?"

Goran Gerasimovski, mayor of Centar Municipality, rejects those claims, arguing the draft reduces the total permitted built area from 43,429 m² to 29,459 m², limits maximum coverage to 40% and reserves at least 40% of the surface for greenery. He says the draft DUP was prepared in line with the General Urban Plan and based on technical analyses, feasibility studies and field surveys that took erosion into account. Gerasimovski further warned that unplanned and illegal construction poses the greatest risk of landslides, while planned and controlled urban solutions are the best guarantee for safe development.

Questions remain about the practical safety of slopes already built on Vodno: the road from Vodno to Sopište has not been commissioned for a decade due to landslides, and the route near TeferiÄ? has been repeatedly impassable for months because of deterioration and instability.

Photo: Слободен печат / Драган Митрески