Investment development of new territories starts with land plots allocation. This is an important procedure, but it is also time-consuming and often carries corruption risks. To complete it, an applicant and a land surveyor should possess extraordinary perseverance and keep an equal mind. Local authorities may delay considering the documents or refuse to approve them at any stage of the procedure. This may happen at stages of getting a permit to develop the documentation, its finalizing, expert reviewing, approving, registering a land plot or registering property rights to it.
In total, an applicant or a land surveyor should make 17 direct contacts with different individuals from the beginning to the end of the procedure. If we sum up all stages of land allocation, we will have a period of 8.5 months. In some regions, such procedures can take 2.5-3 years.
The main cause of this situation is the fact that the law doesn’t specify a full list of grounds for refusal and doesn’t provide for the duty of local authorities to justify it referring to provisions of the legislation for every stage of the documents review.
However, land allocation issues are not a strictly legal problem – it is a set of organizational, technological and technical problems. One of the reasons for this situation is a lack of standardized requirements for land survey works.
BRDO experts together with the Land Surveyors forum (Zemres) conducted a survey among experts in the field of land resources. It showed that the market requires a standard of land allocation projects and step-by-step transition to the completely electronic document management.
The standards of land surveying documents are really required, and 92.4% of respondents said about that. 80.3% of respondents believe that the implementation of standards will reduce a number of comments on land surveying documents from the State Service of Ukraine for Geodesy, Cartography & Cadastre. Another 72.5% of respondents believe that the content of land allocation projects should be optimized. Most of them supported the exclusion of following documents:
- a copy of the request for getting a permit to develop a land surveying project;
- statistical verification letter of land distribution;
- acceptance certificate for land marks storage;
- materials of transferring land boundaries at the site.
85.5% of respondents supported the optimization of land surveying document review methods. Most respondents (24.7%) consider it necessary to stop the pilot project on approval of land allocation projects under the principle of extraterritoriality, and another 21.1% believe that several types of reviewing land surveying documents should be canceled.
Detailed analytics of the survey.
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After conducting the survey, the meeting of representatives of the Land Union of Ukraine, the Association of Land Surveying Experts of Ukraine, the Better Regulation Delivery Office, the Land Management Faculty of the National University of Life and Environmental Sciences of Ukraine, the Faculty of geoinformation systems and territory management of the Kyiv National University of Construction and Architecture as well as practitioners-surveyors was held.
According to the results of the meeting, the following decisions have been adopted:
- Land surveying works require the development of national standards and codes of established procedures. The standards of land surveying documents are based mostly on this type of regulations.
- Prior to the development of standards, it is necessary to obtain from experts the information on problems related to the development and verification of land surveying documents.
- Gathering information on problems of documents development should not be a one-time step. This should be a systematic and continuous work. It is advisable to monitor the Land Surveyors forum (Zemres) on a daily basis as part of this activity.
- Obtained information on problems related to the development and verification of land surveying documents should be combined and systematized.
- The proposals on solutions for every system problem should be prepared by joint efforts.
- The proposals on solving the problems will be sent to the State Service of Ukraine for Geodesy, Cartography & Cadastre and other state government bodies.
- Specialized non-governmental organizations mentioned above, educational and research institutions together with practitioners will advocate proposals among state government bodies turning them into particular draft legal acts, regulations, administrative acts, orders and explanations.
So, the work on solving land surveying problems is rapidly moving into high gear and becoming more organized and systematic. We invite all experts concerned to cooperation.
Now, first of all, we are working on issues related to the preparation and verification of land allocation projects. Please, send your proposals on solving the following problems at [email protected] and [email protected] :
- obtaining a permit to develop a land surveying project on land allocation;
- developing land surveying projects on land allocation;
- geodetic measurements of land plots and their consideration in land allocation projects;
- agreement of land borders with owners of neighboring land plots;
- approval of land allocation projects;
- state registration of land plots;
- state expertise of land allocation projects;
- approval of land surveying projects on land allocation;
- putting land boundaries at the site by using land marks.