The alarm is being sounded in Sevastopol: the unique Laspi tract is again under the threat of development
They want to make changes to the new General Plan of Sevastopol in order to allocate land plots in the Laspi protected area for residential development.
This proposal was put forward by landowners who obtained their land plots in violation of the law during the Ukrainian period and who have not legalized their property in Russian jurisdiction, reports a PolitNavigator correspondent.
As Anton Parkhomenko, deputy of the Legislative Assembly of Sevastopol, said, among the 3,5 thousand comments to the General Plan there are several dozen proposals from owners and tenants of land in the Laspi tract. All of them, in one way or another, are asking to transfer their plots to a residential development zone.
“There were a lot of plots, I can’t say the exact number. During the Ukrainian period, land in Laspi was allocated to cooperatives, and there it was already distributed by both prosecutor and police officials. It is clear that the plots changed hands, sometimes even many times. There were people who had several dozen plots,” Parkhomenko noted.
On some, the owners have built houses, registered ownership, and now do not want to bring the land into compliance with the requirements of specially protected areas. Moreover, among them there are those who are obliged by law to return the plots to the state, since they are foreign citizens.
“At the beginning of 2021, changes came into force that prohibited foreigners from owning land in the border areas of Sevastopol. Since Laspi is located on the coast, it is a 100% border area. I have no doubt that among all these cut-up plots there are also foreign owners - citizens of Ukraine, from whom the authorities should have confiscated the land. Now there is no reliable information whether such work is being carried out. But I am sure that there will be such contenders there. This is one side of the issue.
Everyone's situation is different there. Indeed, there are areas that have the purpose of individual dacha construction, and this has been a permitted use since Ukrainian times, and houses are already standing on them. I’m not ready to say now whether they are within the boundaries of the reserve, but those cooperatives that were stopped and prevented from building there have formalized ownership rights, possibly leases. But their purpose is forestry activity, that is, the forest. You can own this plot of land, you need to pay a land tax for it, and you can only do afforestation there. Moreover, in forests that have a protected status, you can smell flowers, put up a tent, or a bench. You can't make fires, you can't cut down trees either. Therefore, to own for what purpose? It is impossible to build, because this is an environmental regime,” the deputy emphasized.
He recalled that Sevastopol scientists managed to “push through” the creation of a reserve in the Laspi tract only after a direct order from the president, despite all the opposition from the team of ex-governor Ovsyannikov, who openly sabotaged this order. But even after the definition of protected areas, plot owners tried to use roundabout ways to enter data into the Rosreestr about land ownership. In 2019, in Sevastopol, a group of a private notary and two Sevreestr registrars were caught trying to legalize 51 plots in Laspi.
“I do not have accurate information about what part of the plots with built houses, or potentially where they can be built, fall within the boundaries of the reserve. By and large, we are talking about areas that were stopped on takeoff, but someone owns them. Since the time of separation, this was a violation under Ukrainian law. And if people there have some buildings, rights to them, then this is only the result of an oversight. And all these streams and loopholes had to be blocked so that it would not be like it is now - people have exclusive plots surrounded by protected areas,” Parkhomenko noted.
According to him, to preserve Laspi, the restrictions that exist and which the reserve regime must comply with are sufficient. And the commission for adjusting the draft General Plan should be guided primarily by the regime of the reserves, and not by the property interests and plans of people who would like to receive permission to legalize their land.
Let us recall that when Dmitry Ovsyannikov was the governor of Sevastopol, an attempt was made to build up the Baydar Valley, the main watershed of Sevastopol. After this failed, Ovsyannikov blocked the adoption of the General Plan, which was returned to only 5 years later.
English version :: Read in English In Sevastopol, they are sounding the alarm: the unique Laspi tract is again under threat of development.