Extreme development

What to do if you really want to build a cottage community on the shore of the Gulf of Finland, in the forest, not far from St. Petersburg, but there is no free space left? You just need to take any suitable plot, regardless of the category of land, and start building!

In September, heavy equipment and workers appeared on the sandy beach of Dubkovaya Bay near the village of Ozerki (Vyborg District), driving in poles, installing electricity, and making markings on trees. They answered questions from residents that there would be a settlement here. We were also pleased that the small lake near the bay, where pike spawn, will be filled in by the developer!

Rushing to the cadastral map, residents found out that 19 hectares of shore at the southern end of Dubkovaya Bay are listed as an agricultural plot owned by the Ryabovsky cooperative. The latter is the legal successor of the state farm of the same name, which means that the site could have been formed in distant Soviet times. According to documents from the 90s, it is no longer included in the forest fund. The chairman of the Ryabovsky agricultural enterprise, M. M. Ramazanov, responded to the residents’ request that the land near the bay was assigned to the farm by a decree of the head of the Vyborg district administration in 1993. It was not possible to find out the details of this redistribution - the document is not publicly available.

The strange thing here is that this site was registered in the cadastral register only at the end of 2007, when it was already prohibited to register coastal strips as property. In addition, the type of use – “for agricultural production” – does not allow the construction of summer cottages.

Forest management of the territory in the 90s (above) and the scheme of forest blocks in 2010.

What kind of cottage community could there be? To do this, it is necessary to go through a long approval procedure, including public hearings, to overcome the disapproval of Governor Drozdenko, who several years ago declared a moratorium on the transfer of peasant farms to dacha development. And the lake, which, according to our information, is included in the register of spawning water bodies, is not reflected on the site diagram. This means that it is considered dry land, which allows you to fall asleep without a twinge of conscience. This “cadastral error” (in the form of an extra building plot) is clearly to someone’s benefit.

However, only the “wrong” type of permitted use is enough to make any construction here illegal. This explains why the land in the golden spot on the bay wasn't developed until a decade ago.

Profitable forest

But farming is not so bad. The area of ​​the proposed “cottage village” also included a forest fund: a power line was laid through it. The site with an area of ​​20.3 hectares and a coastal strip 640 m long was leased back in 2008 for 49 years by Ozerki LLC. The company approved the construction of a recreation center there, and the development plan available in the editorial office shows the covering of the forest and the shore with a “transparent fence.” How the landlord, the Natural Resources Committee of the Leningrad Region, could agree on an obvious violation of the Forest and Water Codes remains a mystery.

However, this is not the first time he has coordinated forest and coastal fences - remember, for example, the hunting farm of Nikolai Shamalov in the Priozersky region. But the current power line, which is noteworthy, is not on this plan. So, whatever one may say, it turns out to be unauthorized construction in the forest.

The tenant put the forest plot up for sale at a price of $800 per hundred square meters (!). Considering that, for example, in 2014, forest recreational lease in this place cost no more than 150 thousand rubles per hectare per year (!) (Novaya received this information from the local forester of the Tarasovsky section of the Roshchinsky forestry), the efficient tenant expected to transfer the forest with a 3000 percent margin. And, accordingly, the state received less than that.

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It’s strange why every second person didn’t take advantage of such a profitable scheme. But every second person was not allowed to go to the feeding trough.

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A couple of years ago, businessmen contacted the editor who, according to them, were illegally not allowed to participate in a forest auction. Taking into account the fact that many forest plots were put up for resale shortly after the conclusion of lease agreements, it is easy to conclude that they were leased for this purpose.

The names of the tenants do not matter. Forest “developers” usually have several legal entities created specifically for the next lease agreement. The sale of a leased plot represents the sale of a legal entity in whose name an agreement has been concluded and a project for the development of the plot has been agreed upon. For example, in Toksovo, where the same scheme was widely used in 2008–2012, potential tenants without much hesitation attracted investors to their project even before concluding a lease agreement. “I was told that I could contribute money and stake out one of the pieces of the plot, which was already cut out on the plan,” an interlocutor at the Toksovo eco-activity told us. “And then, as they promised, the site will be leased and eventually removed from the forest fund through the procedure of changes to the general plan. And then it will be possible to privatize your plot.” That is, the “project” could be carried out without any money at all, by attracting funds from co-investors and concluding a lease agreement for them. The only start-up capital required was proximity to the landlord, the Natural Resources Committee.

Vyborg hectares

The years 2008–2014 saw a boom in such forest “transfers.” Why since 2008? Because it was from this year that the massive transfer of forests for recreational lease began, permitted by the new Forest Code of 2007. After that, all regional highways were decorated with banners about the sale (sic) of forest plots ranging from 2 to 30 hectares each, located certainly near the water. Banners offered forest in the Zheltaya, Dubkovaya, Malostrovskaya bays, on Lake Pionerskoye, Bannoye, Bolshoye Barkovo, on Ladoga, Vuoksa and other places. The fact that leased forest areas can neither be sold nor developed did not bother anyone - neither the sellers, nor for some reason the employees of the supervisory authorities. When contacted by the prosecutor's office and the Committee on Natural Resources, the departments invariably responded that they could not take response measures until construction had begun. “Timber sales banners” were duplicated on the Internet on the websites of the companies “Peterland”, “Land Aspect”, “Best Lands”, CFD-group, “Zagorod.Ru”, as well as on many other smaller ones, including private advertisements on Avito. Now most of them have been taken off the market (and many have already been built on), but environmental activists have carefully preserved screenshots of them in this registry.

The advertisements did not hide the fact that they were offering the sale of state forests. Sometimes the seller delicately offered a plot of land for development as a “recreation center” (that is, a format permitted in the forest fund), but often buyers were recklessly promised the right to everything: “Construction is permitted. At the buyer's request, I will convert it for recreation, summer cottage construction, or any convenient type of permitted use. Fast, inexpensive (from 30 thousand rubles), with a contract.”

Current events in Dubkovaya Bay suggest that the forest has found its “investor” and, together with the neighboring agricultural plot, has become part of a construction and recreational project. A softer option: only the agricultural land is going to be built up, and the power line is pulled through the forest, because it is not approved and it is more convenient to hide it. This assumption is supported by the recent story of “gray electricians” of PJSC Lenenergo, who unauthorizedly installed poles in the southern part of the Vyborg region. The Natural Resources Committee could provide clarity, but there is still no response to a request sent there more than a month ago.