As of 1 January 2018 the Amendment of the Building Act, i.e. the Act No. 225/2017 Coll., amending the Act No. 183/2006 Coll., on town and country planning and building code (Building Act), became effective in the Czech Republic.
Part two of this article is devoted to additional changes in the area of Zoning and Building Permit Proceedings. Further, it provides an overview of the most important changes relating to the area of Municipality Planning, namely from the investor’s point of view.
D. PROCESS SIMPLIFICATION FOR MINOR DEVELOPERS
The most noticeable benefit for minor developers is the possibility to build family houses or family recreation structures only based on a notification, i.e. without an obligation to apply for a building permit – regardless of the size of the build-in area (until now there was a limit of 150 m2 ).
Without any permit procedure with the building authority, i.e. in so-called free regime, it will be possible to construct:
- greenhouse structures with build-in area of max. 40 m2, the maximum height 5 m, minimum distance of 2 m from the land border and without any underground floor;
- swimming pool structures with build-in area of max. 40 m2, including its technical facilities, situated on the plot of land adjacent to a family house or a recreation structure;
- fences up to the height of 2 m that do not border publicly accessible roads or public areas and are in a developed area;
- sale stands structures, constructions and systems for festive decorations and lighting of buildings whose location does not exceed 30 subsequent days (short-term transferable systems serving namely for one-time events, e.g. markets, grape harvest, etc.).
E. OCCUPANCY PERMIT
In the field of permitting the utilization of the completed structures comes to further deregulation, in particularly:
- the developer’s obligation to notify the building authority of the intention to commence the occupancy is cancelled. It means that simple structures (e.g. family houses), which subject to occupancy notification up till now, may be newly utilized without any occupancy procedure;
- the obligation to apply for an occupancy approval remains, but will refer only to structures which were under this obligation already according to the existing law. Pursuant to the new legislation, the occupancy approval will be mandatory only for structures specified by Section 119 (1) of BA, which are generally determined as structures requiring higher protection because of public interest (e.g. hospitals, schools, commercial or industrial facilities, roads and etc.);
- new legislation also re-introduces an occupancy permit proceeding, which will be applied only for constructions which require an occupancy approval and for which the building authority stated that the application was not complete or the conditions for issuance of the occupancy approval were not met. In this case the building authority may open an occupancy permit proceedings, followed by the issuance of the occupancy permit. Unlike the occupancy approval, the occupancy permit may include conditions for structures utilization (e.g. a period for small defects removal).
II. Changes relating to Municipality Planning
From the investor’s point of view the main changes in this area are following:
- time restriction of implementation procedure of updates/changes planning documentation (i.e. updates of development principles, changes in plans or regulatory plans), provided that it is not necessary to work out different solution variants in the territory;
- restriction of time period for submitting a proposal for cancellation of planning documentation from 3 years to 1 years from its effectiveness date;
- planning study (i.e. planning materials suggesting and considering possible solutions of selected problems within the area – such as public infrastructure or public space) might be newly elaborated also upon request (and costs) of the developer in order to accelerate territory preparation for the respective programme realisation;
- better change for the developers to get easily acquainted with all municipality and country planning documents due to their mandatory publication on the internet, specifically on websites of particular municipalities or regions, whose authorities procure the respective planning documentation, and further on the municipality and country planning portal on the address: http://portal.uur.cz/.