Parliament has passed as a whole the law on amendments to certain legislative acts of Ukraine on reforming urban planning with 228 MPs voting in favour, Voice faction MP Yaroslav Zheleznyak has said.
Earlier, Chesno NGO reported that if the law is adopted, "serious preferences will be given to developers, and citizens will have no real leverage over them".
"A number of organizations submitted their comments to the (local government) committee, but they were ignored. The National Agency for Preventing Corruption identified corruption risks in the document and expressed its reservations. Now the anticorruption body is investigating in an emergency mode whether all its reservations have been taken into account. This is despite the fact that the draft law, if adopted, will come into force only six months after its promulgation and there is time to eliminate all the issues," Chesno stressed.
Before the vote, the Association of Ukrainian Cities (AUC) categorically opposed the draft law No. 5655 on changing the urban planning system. The heads of Ukrainian cities, villages and settlements are convinced that the law "leads to monopolization of the construction market, deprives the public and local authorities of the opportunity to influence illegal developments, leads to compensation to unauthorized developers from the local budget, violates the rights of land owners and destroys the achievements of decentralization".
The AUC statement was signed by about 40 mayors of Ukrainian cities. Among them are Kyiv mayor Vitaliy Klitschko (chairman of the AUC), Lviv mayor Andriy Sadovyy, Khmelnytskyy mayor Oleksandr Symchyshyn, Chernihiv mayor Vladyslav Atroshenko, Ternopil mayor Vitaliy Nadal, Rivne mayor Oleksandr Tretyak, Vinnytsya mayor Serhiy Morhunov, Zhytomyr mayor Serhiy Sukhomlyn and others.