Odesa City Council to Save ₴ 20M by Merging Land and Architecture Departments

The Odesa City Council is considering creating a single department based on two structures - the Department of Land Resources and the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning. This will help save the city more than UAH 20 million.

This was announced by Vice Mayor Oleksandr Filatov during a meeting of the Standing Committee on Spatial Development, Land Management and Regulation of Land Rights.

According to the official, the reason for the initiative is the need for an integrated approach to urban planning. The city council emphasizes that all key decisions in the field of land use are based on urban planning documentation, as urban planning cadastral data is the basis for making land management decisions.

"We analyzed the laws on the state land cadastre and land management, and also studied the experience of other cities such as Mykolaiv, Dnipro, Cherkasy, Zhytomyr, and Chernivtsi. In many of them, these functions have already been consolidated into a single department, which simplifies processes and increases their efficiency," Filatov explained.

According to him, the structure and functionality of the departments have also been studied. In particular, it is planned to redistribute responsibilities between departments. For example, the approval of temporary structures is to be transferred to district architects so that they can comprehensively assess the situation in their areas. In addition, the units responsible for engineering networks, red lines and the development of the city cadastre will be strengthened.

The deputy mayor noted that the reorganization will not only improve interaction between the authorities, business and citizens, but also optimize budget expenditures. According to estimates, the merger of the departments will save over UAH 20 million, reducing expenditures from UAH 73 million to less than UAH 50 million per year.

"Now, for example, an application is submitted to the Department of Land Resources, then the documents are transferred to the Department of Architecture, and it takes another 30 days for approval. If we unite these departments, the issue can be resolved in just a few days, with simple memos," he explained.

During the meeting of the commission, MP Zhanna Mandrichenko emphasized that the need to unite the structures has been obvious for a long time: "Such a chain of documents even in the electronic document management system seems unnecessary and inefficient."

She also drew attention to the problems of urban planning documentation, which often becomes an obstacle to the realization of citizens' rights: "Every session I have to shyly refuse people who have lived in their house for three generations just because on paper their land plot has suddenly become some kind of public development zone that will never be realized."

On March 5, the acting director of the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning, Marat Kasimov, was detained in Odesa while receiving a $10,000 bribe.

Ірина Глухова