The Ministry of Ecology, Spatial and Urban Planning has decided to terminate the contracts with the expert teams engaged for the development of the spatial plan of Montenegro by 2040 and the general regulation plan of Montenegro by 2030, the Daily Pobjeda reports.
At the end of last year, the teams for the development of these planning documents were notified by the Ministry of the intention to terminate the contracts. Last week, this government department did not have time to confirm the information to Pobjeda and give an answer to why the Ministry opted for such action.
The head of the spatial plan development team, Ms. Svetlana Jovanović, MA, believes that the line minister, Mr. Ratko Mitrović, and his associates did not have full information on the plan development or the work done to date. The head of the general regulation plan team, Ms. Ksenija Vukmanović, believes, however, that the reason for such action was not the minister’s lack of information or lack of knowledge of his legal team, but the intention to replace the expert team, which was legally selected and carried out work under the contract, with a new one, more to the Minister’s liking.
Ms. Vukmanović also announces a lawsuit, if the Ministry sticks to the position that the contract should be terminated, and warns that in that case the compensation for the damage that the Government, i.e., the citizens of Montenegro, would have to compensate to this expert team would be extremely large considering that the contract is worth two million euros.
The Law on Spatial Planning and Construction of Structures from 2017 envisages the development of two planning documents for the territory of Montenegro – the spatial plan and the general regulation plan.
Considering that the current Spatial Plan of Montenegro has been prepared for the period until 2020, as well as most of the lower-level planning documents, the previous ministry in charge of spatial planning (Ministry of Sustainable Development and Tourism), started drafting new planning documents – spatial plan and general regulation plan last year.
