The new construction came into effect on Monday, including the controversial shift to digital submission of construction permits. Well, the reviews are in and they’re about as bad as expected. Among the harshest came from the Association of Developers. “Unfortunately, what the Association repeatedly warned about happened,” writes its director Zdeněk Soudný. “The system, civil servants, the professional environment and the implementation decrees were unprepared, as were the methodological materials. There’s a lack of well-trained offers and problems with linking the state administration bodies into the entire process.” Soudný says that in place of a fully-integrated digital system for the permitting process, what we have is merely an electronic pathway for sending PDF files. His only hope is that this new methodology can eventually evolve into true digitization.
The truth is that construction office officials had warned for months that the new system’s rollout would be rocky. As a result of he warning, investors submitted a tidal wave of last-minute permit applications in the weeks before July 1. “We were used to getting about 5 applications per day,” Brno–Židenice’s mayor told SeznamZpravy. “Recently, it was about 90.” Almost as an afterthought, SZ wrote that “some” construction offices were reporting problems with the new digital systems. How many of these problems come from poor training and/or incompetence and how many of them are systemic failures remains to be seen.
