eProstor solves a major obstacle to investing in Serbia

The development of spatial and urban plans that determine the purposes and prescribe the rules of construction is a major bottleneck for investment in Serbia. It takes at least half a year to adopt a detailed regulation plan, respecting all procedures, and at least 12 months for a general regulation plan. However, in practice, adoption procedures often take years due to insufficiently efficient communication and coordination of the competent authorities. NALED sees the solution in the establishment of the digital platform eProstor.
eProstor would allow institutions to electronically exchange information, provide comments, issue conditions and approvals, and work on the platform simultaneously to make plans, instead of now waiting for each other to do their part. It would also be an advanced system that could be integrated with the system for issuing various permits for construction purposes, and it would also be an easily searchable database of all planning documents in Serbia. Thanks to eProstor, we would speed up the process of making plans, achieve great savings and increase the transparency of the adoption of planning documents – says Dragana Cukic, vice president of the Board of NALED and member of the Board of the Association of Consulting Engineers of Serbia (ACES).
One of the key features of eProstor would be easier and timely involvement of citizens and the economy in all phases of making plans. Through the public part of the portal, they could mark the zone they are particularly interested in and receive notification in almost real time electronically when someone has initiated a change in the planning document or submitted a request for a building permit and, in accordance with legal procedures, respond in a timely manner.
This would prevent situations where investors have already obtained building permits, and citizens find out that construction will take place only when excavators appear, when it is too late to influence the intended purpose or parameters. We currently have several examples (small hydropower plants, changes in the purpose of green areas in construction zones, etc.) where citizens prevent construction by protests, and investors who have obtained permits from the state can seek and exercise the right to compensation, which will be paid from the budget – explains Cukic and emphasizes the importance of eProstor for the improvement of the culture of timely involvement of all interested parties in the development of plans.
By connecting with the Republic Geodetic Authority, eProstor would enable the information needed for construction to be quickly withdrawn from the cadastre, as well as the data in the cadastre to be regularly updated. The fact that all institutions work on one planning document at the same time, would certainly influence the stricter observance of deadlines and the inclusion of up-to-date and complete data in the planning documents, which would improve the quality of these documents.
At the moment, the territory of Serbia is well covered by planning documents, but in many cases they are incomplete and need to be further developed through more detailed plans, which often have to be financed by investors to be able to build, without a deadline for projects. The lack of a single database of all plans with up-to-date and complete data makes it difficult even for professionals to determine precisely under what conditions it can be built in a certain zone, which would be solved by eProstor.
Serbia has significantly improved the regulations for the management of geospatial data and created a framework for the development of the eProstor platform and electronic procedures for the development of planning documents. On the way to eProstor, it is necessary to improve the availability of data and their standardization and digitization, Plus Online reports.