Stevo Davidović: The Plan significantly reduces the building area from 15 to 9%

Following yesterday’s press release issued by the NGO Ozone in relation to the Special Purpose Spatial Plan for the Coastal Zone, Stevo Davidović, Head of the Division for National Planning Documents at the Ministry of Sustainable Development and Tourism issues the following statement:

The Draft Spatial Plan for the Coastal Zone, which is presently under public debate, stipulates a significant reduction of the building area – from 15% to as little as 9%, providing at the same time added value to space designing by putting a special emphasis on the development of luxury tourism. In other words, the plan is on the one hand very restrictive towards the construction of residential units and fragmentation of the housing stock near the coastline, and on the other, it encourages the construction of sustainable, high-quality tourist facilities. This is why criticisms made by the NGO Ozone are in the least difficult to understand, since this organization is well known to the general public precisely for its activities focused primarily on the environmental protection.

The Plan was prepared in compliance with the Barcelona Convention, as a regulatory basis for some of the most important activities in the field of protection of the marine environment and coastal areas, and on the basis of a large number of researches conducted within the CAMP project (Coastal Area Management Program). The provision of the Convention stipulating the limitation of construction activities in the narrow coastal zone is not an invention of ours, but it applies to all states signatories of the Convention.

Also, requests made yesterday by the NGO are highly contradictory: on the one hand, there is a request to withdraw the Plan from the public debate, but on the other at the same time the NGO appeals to the expert community to take part in it. Nevertheless, we hereby inform the NGO and the rest of the interested general public, that the Ministry decided to postpone the closing date of the public debate, which so far involved more than one thousand citizens, until 12 March, precisely because of the importance of this document and the need to obtain as many good-quality suggestions and comments.

To conclude, it remains unclear why some people, instead of using the public debate for what it is meant for, i.e. presenting suggestions and comments to be taken in consideration by the developer of this planning document in order to evaluate their justification, place in media the information that unfortunately do not conform to the facts. If the NGO representatives so far had no opportunity to read the Plan, which has been posted on the website of the Government of Montenegro since 28 December, the Ministry remains at the disposal to organize an expert meeting with the aim to clarify any unsolved question.

Once again, we invite experts and lay persons to give their contribution to bringing added value that, we are convinced, underlies this document.