Translated material
News from the border
Municipalities will have the right to distribute public land
From July 1, the rules on the land turnover market will change. New rules for delineating public lands between levels of government should simplify land problems for business, but may be fraught with litigation.The question of who manages state undelimited lands is far from idle. The owners of any large construction project, be it an assembly plant of a Western automaker or a cottage community, must first of all resolve the situation with the provision of a land plot. Local authorities manage undelimited lands according to the law, but the current law sets a strict condition: any potential operations with a land plot (transfer from one category to another) must be coordinated with the federal center. For example, an automobile assembly plant requires several hectares of land. But surely in such a territory there will be lands with the status of farmland that need to be classified into other categories. The decision on the privatization of land in different regions and in different situations is made today by those federal bodies that made the decision on the privatization of the enterprise, and by those who resolved the issue of providing the site, that is, by regional authorities and local governments (district and settlement level) .
The law on amendments to the Land Code adopted in April clearly states that all decisions on the privatization of state lands will be made by municipalities, with the exception of Moscow, St. Petersburg and the administrative centers of the federal subjects. The state appears to be moving away from the idea of a comprehensive demarcation and recognizing that land can exist in an undemarcated form. And by default, the municipality must manage undemarcated land.
True, experts see a number of problems in the introduction of the new order. According to Vitaly Mozharovsky, partner of the law firm Pepelyaev, Goltsblat and Partners, given the fact that from July 1 the government decree of 2002, obliging the coordination of significant land transactions with the federal center, is not automatically repealed, legal disputes can be expected. It is also unclear how municipalities will allocate land in cases where the land should be used for national projects, the lawyer says.
Land rent will also be calculated in a new way from July 1. If today, when determining the cost of rent, only the location of the plot is taken into account, then next month, when calculating the cost, the type of activity that the entrepreneur conducts on this land will also be taken into account. That is, for factories, shops and casinos, rental rates may now differ significantly. In addition, the law no longer requires leases to be re-signed annually if the city sets new rates. Land tenants will actually be faced with the fact that rates will change. Moreover, the new requirements of the law will give local authorities additional grounds for increasing rental prices: land rental rates may be revised from July 1 if urban planning requirements change. That is, by including the site in the new urban plan, the city will have legal and reasonable grounds to raise the rental price.