People will get to the proposal for the new zoning plan of Liberec in a month

Liberec - The residents of Liberec will be able to familiarize themselves with the proposal for a new zoning plan in about a month. Public discussions will begin around mid-June, although exact dates have not yet been set, said the mayor of Liberec, Tibor Batthyány (former ANO), today to ČTK. Apart from discussions, interested parties will also be able to familiarize themselves with the proposal for the zoning plan at an information office at the city hall, which will be temporarily established for this purpose.

The development of the zoning plan, which is supposed to address the development of the hundred-thousand-strong city over the next 20 to 30 years, has been in progress at the town hall since 2007. The validity of the current plan will end in 2020. According to the original schedule, the new zoning plan was supposed to be approved three years ago. However, the current town hall leadership, which emerged from the municipal elections in 2014, decided to revise the previous proposal with the aim of approving it no later than the end of June 2017. They failed to achieve that, and the preparation is constantly falling behind and will take at least another year.

The mayor believes that one public hearing will not be sufficient, which will mean further delays. "I fear that there will be repeated discussions of the zoning plan," he stated. According to him, the new zoning plan would then be issued only sometime in October or November 2020. "But that is a deadline I have been signaling from the start. The process cannot be shortened," he added. Residents and organizations have raised 2,700 objections and comments regarding both the previous and current draft, about 700 of which pertained to the most recent proposal. "Some were answered with rejections. Therefore, it can be expected that those people will continue to be dissatisfied and will come again during the public discussion," said Batthyány.

The preparation of the zoning plan complicates the city's development, which the mayor also admits. "This is a problem for potential investors or people who want to move in and build, but the zoning plan does not allow them to do so," he said. In preparing the new zoning plan, only so-called strategic changes can be made. One such change was approved by the council a month ago and will allow for a second connection for the Jih industrial zone to be built. The new road is expected to relieve the congested street of České mládeže, which is currently practically the only access road to the zone and sees up to 17,000 cars passing through daily. The change to the zoning plan approved last autumn allowed for the continuation of a billion-dollar project, which is expected to result in a new district in the lower center in a few years. The project for the Perštýn area plans to build an underground data center, and above it, over 20 administrative and residential buildings with 350 apartments and garages for 750 cars, a kindergarten, a senior care home, sports facilities, and a park.