Moscow authorities are considering ways to regulate construction on cottage land plots in the Greater Moscow area, which passed into their jurisdiction on July 1, chairman of the city’s committee for state construction supervision Anatoly Zaiko said Monday.
There are currently no strict rules about construction on garden plots, and this potentially allows the plot owners to build two-story apartment structures on their land or register many families on one plot.
“We cannot allow this. People should be able to rest and work on their gardens,” Zaiko said. “Let them build small cottages instead.”
The committee created two new bureaus, Troitskoye and Novomoskovskoye, to inspect construction projects in Greater Moscow. These bureaus will not regulate the construction of cottages in the area, but only residential buildings where people live year-round.
Zaiko said he expects to find a lot of violations on construction sites in the area.
The committee for state construction supervision was responsible for 3,000 construction sites in Moscow in the first half of 2012, including buildings as well as road and infrastructure projects. The 10,121 checks on construction sites by municipal inspectors yielded 40,957 violations.
The majority of the violations concerned cases of missing documents, disregard of fire safety rules, low worker qualifications and lack of supervision over construction workers.
The number of violations is higher than in previous years, although Zaiko said the increase is due to the reduced workload and, consequently, higher vigilance of the inspectors.
According to municipal norms, one inspector should be assigned to monitor six to eight construction projects. In reality, there is one inspector for 15 projects, and this number is still an improvement from three years ago, when one inspector rushed to keep track of 40 projects at a time.
The increasing number of construction projects also increased the violations count. The committee gave permits for the construction of 259 capital objects in the first half of 2012. That is 30 percent higher than the number of permits given during the same period last year.
