This post was automatically translated into English
The obstacle to Lithuania’s progress is the slow decisions of the administration.
The obstacle to Lithuania’s progress is the slow decisions of the administration.
Slow and inefficient state and local government administration, which has traditionally made Lithuania lag behind the progress of the Baltic states, may become fatal in the conditions of rising wages and increasing inflation, say real estate developers. The price of poor administration is the failure to receive timely European support, underdeveloped infrastructure and the country’s lost competitive advantage.
One of the most notable recent events – the resolution of the Vilnius District Municipality suspending the preparation of the detailed plan for the Vilnius Southern Bypass – is yet another example of misadministration in the already quite extensive gallery of caricatures of Lithuanian governance.
The capital, which is suffocating from cars, should be saved by bypass roads, including the section of the ninth European corridor that will be created in the Vilnius district, connecting Minsk-Vilnius and Vilnius-Klaipėda, which is supervised by the Lithuanian Road Administration under the Ministry of Transport and Communications, and the territory is managed by the Vilnius district municipality.
It stopped the preparation of the detailed plan for the latter bypass. True, temporarily. And not the preparation work itself, for example, due to its inadequate quality, but its own decision two years ago. Back in 2005. March 10. Vilnius District Municipality Council approved the “preparation of a special plan for the southern bypass between the A1 Vilnius-Kaunas-Klaipėda main road and the A3 Vilnius-Minsk main road route VI variant”.
Translated into simpler language, this means that with the new decision, Vilnius District Municipality has scrapped seven years of joint preparatory work. During those years, six versions of the bypass section were created, discussions took place, one of the six versions of the road project was approved, the decision was valid for two years, and then it became unsuitable. The formal reason is that Vilnius District Municipality received 148 complaints from local residents. And the real one?
This decision came as a surprise to both the Lithuanian Road Administration and the Vilnius County Administration, who had only learned about the events in the Vilnius district from the press.
According to Vilnius County Governor Alfonso Macaitis, “changing one’s own previously made decision is a kind of absurdity. It is also a huge blow to the city of Vilnius, which has 500,000 inhabitants, and its ability to have bypass roads and not pollute. This train can no longer be turned around, people are being annoyed in vain.”
Real estate development companies, who have been waiting for many years for the efficiency of planning and administration work in the Vilnius district to improve, are also running out of patience:
“This is an act of a small principality that shows not concern for its residents, but a simple inability to manage. Lithuania continues to remain a poorly administered backwater, comparable only to Romania and Bulgaria. And while such processes of fermentation of a small pond are taking place, progressive citizens are leaving to live abroad,” says Viktorija Beatričė Radzevičienė, Development Director of the real estate development company “Eika”.
According to real estate developers, the inability of the Vilnius district municipality to make administrative decisions quickly and effectively has long become a system. Another obvious example is the general plan that has been in preparation for five years, without which no modernization of the Vilnius district is possible.
The conclusions of the investigation conducted by the State Audit Office of the Republic of Lithuania on March 30, 2007 state that Vilnius District Municipality, having started the process of preparing a general plan back in early 2002, has not been able to complete it to this day.
The National Audit Office report also stated at the time that “members of municipal councils and responsible administration employees should understand that by taking such a slow pace, and perhaps by delaying the preparation and approval of general plans for one reason or another, they are hindering the growth of investment in their territories, which is detrimental to the social and economic well-being of the population and the growth of many other indicators. Once the general plans of municipal territories are approved, procedures for changing the purpose of land plots should intensify, the supply of plots should increase, and construction activity should become more active.”
However, Vilnius District Municipality does not yet have its own general plan. The latest set completion date for the preparation work is September 1st of this year, or at least that date is stated in the explanatory letters to the Vilnius County Governor’s Administration.
According to the deputy mayor of Vilnius district municipality, Jan Sinicki, the work on the preparation of the bypass special plan had to be stopped because “people who own plots of land in the road protection zone must be fairly and reasonably compensated, according to the market price.”
He also mentions that the European corridor and especially the road protection zone will run through land plots that were recently returned to their owners. However, according to A. Macaitis, the land in the bypass area was returned precisely because the Vilnius district municipality failed to prepare a general plan within five years. And while there is no such plan, the laws allow the return of land in rural areas.
“Now we can only state that not only the possibilities of attracting European funds, but also the chance of Vilnius district becoming a wealthy district are being pushed into an even further uncertain future,” says VB Radzevičienė.
According to the employees of the prospective planning department of the Lithuanian Road Administration, complaints always arise when building roads because two extremes have to be reconciled – on the one hand, residents’ transportation improves and the value of their plots increases, and on the other – their plots are assigned easements and restrictions. All procedures take quite a long time anyway.
Meanwhile, in order to use European funds, one should have a coordinated project, and only then look for support funds. The longer the delay, the more expensive the work. Since March 2005, when the Vilnius District Council approved the selected, sixth, project by its decision, the cost of road works has increased by over 20 percent.
And the Vilnius County Governor’s Administration claims that after the recent elections, few new people have joined the Vilnius District Municipality, even the district mayor, Marija Rekst, remained in her post.