Kuyumdjieva & Vitliemov

06 March 2017

Amendments in Spatial Development Act

New amendments in the Spatial Development Act effective from 07.02.2017 introduced a series of changes regarding the spatial planning, the construction process and the responsibility of the administration. Some of the most important changes include:

New grounds for amendment of detailed development plan which came into effect are incompleteness or error in the cadastral map, served as a basis for drafting the plan.

Complex report, on the compliance assessment of investment projects shall be compulsory with respect to the third category of constructions, not only for first and second categories of constructions, as it was before the amendments in the law.

Holders of construction permits may request its revalidation within 3-month period (not within 1 year as it was before the amendments in the law). Revalidation can be done only once.

Before the start of the construction, the contractor must submit for approval to the municipality a plan for the management of construction waste products (if required) and safety and health plan. An additional requirement for the opening of the construction site is the contracting authority to submit the approved plans, construction contract and supervision contract with the designer. So far, the construction site was discovered only after presentation of a construction contract.

 A new obligation for the construction supervision, respectively, for the technical manager – for constructions of fifth category, is the submission of a request to the municipality for drawing up a protocol for opening of the construction site. If an employee of the administration does not appear on the designated date, the Protocol shall be drawn up without his participation.

– The municipalities and the state should create and maintain public registers of the issued decisions on approval of the development plans, of the construction permits and of the construction entered into exploitation.

The individual administrative acts approving the detailed development plans are subject to appeal by the general order of the Administrative Procedure Code, unlike the previous version of the law, which provided that decisions of the Court regarding the appeal of these acts were final.