Documents are being reduced for construction sites – Newspaper Kommersant No. 229 (7430) dated 12/09/2022

The Moscow Mayor’s Office has decided to give developers some relief by reducing the processing time for some of the documents required to start construction. This must be done by all regions on behalf of the federal government, which has promised to gradually reduce the package of initial permits by a third. But, as Kommersant found out, the city authorities have so far made only small concessions. Builders are expectedly dissatisfied.

At the disposal of Kommersant was the response of the head of the department of urban planning policy of Moscow, Sergei Levkin, sent on November 18 to the request of the Investors Club of Moscow (KIM, unites developers) with a request to reduce the investment and construction cycle at the municipal level. It follows from the letter that the Moscow authorities intend to reduce the time for issuing a certificate of approval of the architectural and urban planning solution of an object, give developers the opportunity to make changes to applications and documents to it if obtaining a permit for cutting or replanting green spaces is suspended, and will reduce the time for coordinating this procedure.

In addition, developers will now be able to switch to a notification procedure during earthworks and the installation of temporary fences and facilities. Also, the authorities are ready to regulate the coordination of work at the subway and shorten this procedure. The department of urban policy essentially did not answer Kommersant.

In March 2022, the government decided that the list of required initial permits and design documentation for construction should be reduced by 30%. In total, 238 out of 989 requirements have been canceled, and from September 1, concessions were to take effect at the regional and municipal levels. But not all regions then fulfilled this requirement (see Kommersant of September 14).

All the changes described by the department of urban policy relate to the most common urban planning procedures in the city, which developers deal with in practice, notes Vladislav Preobrazhensky, Executive Director of KIM. But the changes will affect mainly local types of work, says Tatyana Khovaeva, Deputy Technical Director of WE-ON Group. The interlocutor of Kommersant from among the developers says that the concessions of the mayor’s office are “cosmetic”. In the general investment and construction cycle, the procedures, the term of which the mayor’s office intends to reduce, do not take much time, agrees Nikolai Shubin, Director for Support of Urban Planning Activities of the Inteko Group of Companies.

All processes affected by innovations are always carried out in parallel, and the result of obtaining certain documents does not generally affect the work in other areas, recalls Denis Lebedev, Vice President for Development and GR GloraX. It is obvious that these plans by themselves will not provide a 30% reduction in the investment and construction cycle, adds Oleg Grishunin, Director for Legal and Corporate Affairs at BEL Development Group.

Market participants expect further movement to reduce such a list in order to get away from approvals, the terms of which are still measured not in months, but in years, says Oleg Grishunin. For example, Ingrad believes that simplifying the procedure for reducing or eliminating sanitary protection zones and refusing to hold public hearings, or at least reducing their timeframe, could significantly reduce the time it takes to approve documentation.

The construction time is still catastrophically long, so it should be reduced by at least 40% in the near future, and not by changing the construction technology, but only by eliminating redundant, morally and normatively obsolete requirements, the CEO of Smart Engineers believes Hussein Pliev. “For example, ten days of downtime for a project with a budget of 2 billion rubles. brings the developer a loss in the form of lost profits in the amount of 5 million rubles, which is, in fact, an indirect business tax for the current level of bureaucracy,” he adds. However, Glincom investment manager Natalya Ladin objects, many metropolitan developers have already forgotten how they carried documentation for approval in volumes, and all adjustments were made manually.

Daria Andrianova