Translated material
"The population's appetite knows no bounds"
The Public Chamber became interested in the “dacha amnesty”
The new dacha season, it seems, will not yet please the owners of land plots who are trying to register their ownership of the three to six hundred square meters received under the Soviet Union. The simplified procedure for registering rights to real estate, popularly called the “dacha amnesty,” is still selective : some still cannot find the mysterious “household books” and get through the bureaucratic authorities, while others have already found a loophole in the law and are buying within “amnesty” of land for next to nothing. Why the “dacha amnesty” is stalled and how to distinguish respectable gardeners from scammers, members of the Public Chamber tried to understand yesterday.The law, which simplifies the registration of dachas , garden houses, and land plots, has been in effect since September 1, 2006. The law simplifies the list of documents that a summer resident must collect in order for the right of “lifelong inheritable possession” to turn into ownership. Initially, it was assumed that the recipients of the law were to be numerous members of gardening partnerships and those who received a plot in ancient times even before the mass gardening rush. However, so far, out of 40 million potential participants in the “dacha amnesty,” only tens of thousands have managed to register land plots as their property. The rest are still trying to obtain numerous certificates, order an expensive cadastral plan, or prove their ownership of the plot.
According to the chairman of the Public Chamber commission on the development of civil society, Maria Slobodskaya, the law simply does not answer what to do with many lands: if vegetable gardens are “cut” along railways or under power lines, where the lands are in federal ownership; if the sites are located near water bodies, where today there are water protection zones. On the other hand, she admits, it is not clear how to deal with the squatters of summer residents who decided that the “dacha amnesty” gave them the opportunity to add forest plots and public roads to plots. And what should a developing city do, which cannot be built in breadth, finding itself in a ring of dacha developments?
The law on “dacha amnesty” is only one of the local ways to solve the complex “dacha” problem, member of the Public Chamber Vyacheslav Glazychev is sure. Established social structures, huge zones of habitable development - holiday villages - actually turn out to be invisible zones from an administrative point of view. Neither firefighters, nor police, nor ambulances “see” them.
“Due to the absence of the main link, namely land surveying, in the law on simplified registration of rights to real estate, the law does not work. And only when the law on the cadastre is adopted, this will open the so-called “dacha amnesty,” says Viktor Pleskachevsky, head of the State Duma Committee on Property. The main thing, in his opinion, is that there is a gradual abandonment of the rudiments of Soviet law, constructions such as “lifelong inherited ownership.” In the absence of full ownership of land, even collateral procedures take several months in Russia, while in Kazakhstan it takes three days to register land as collateral, the deputy explained.
The issue of “dacha amnesty” seems to be gradually becoming political: over the past year, President Putin has reminded five times that the problem of legalizing land plots needs to be solved, but the problem itself seems to have bifurcated depending on from whose side one looks at it. On the one hand, people cannot understand why the right to legally received hundred square meters has to be confirmed a second time by looking in the local administration for certain household records, which often were simply not kept in some villages, and why a piece of paper about participation in gardening has been carefully kept in a sideboard for three decades. the partnership suddenly lost its strength. The law on simplified declaration, in fact, is not intended to regulate all the features of registration of ownership of plots of gardening partnerships. On the other hand, the state is not yet able not only to ensure the massive registration of land plots as property, but even simply to decide who has the right to participate in the “dacha amnesty.”
A new type of “dacha” fraud has appeared in the Moscow region. From the local administration, a person takes a certificate about the allegedly unfinished construction of a non-existent house, using this certificate to register ownership of a plot of land almost free of charge, paying for the land at a residual value of 5 thousand rubles. per hundred, explained Deputy Head of Rosprirodnadzor Oleg Mitvol. A lot of crime has grown out of the “dacha” soil, Mr. Mitvol says, the search for land maps from the 80s of the last century turns into a detective task, they are “eaten by mice” or they suddenly “burn out.” “Therefore, the state should not simplify its position in protecting the land issue. Otherwise, the same retired summer residents will become a toy in the hands of those who put the illegal construction of holiday villages on stream,” Oleg Mitvol is sure. In the village of Rechnik, on the territory allocated 50 years ago for apple orchards to strengthen the river bank, the owners of huge mansions built without any permits go to a rally, hiding behind veterans who have panel houses of one and a half square meters, he explains.
True, the very opposition of “rich” and “poor” summer residents, often used by politicians, is also fraught with troubles: after all, the presence of a large house on the site does not at all indicate the criminal past of the owner. But such a simplified formulation of the issue only creates additional social tension, which is sought by many politicians during the pre-election period.
In the meantime, according to the acting head of the Rosregistration department for ensuring the established procedure for state registration of rights to real estate, Alexey Akchurin, Rosregistration refuses the majority of citizens who submit documents for registration of property rights for dacha plots. People either come without any documents at all confirming their right to own a land plot, or they add to their plot a plot of even larger area than the original one. “The population’s appetite knows no bounds,” the official concluded.