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President Signs Decree on Federal Land
On his first day on the job, almost immediately after his inauguration yesterday, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed an order directing the Vladimir Putin government to begin a large-scale redistribution of federal lands this year. The order requires the government to submit a draft law to the State Duma within a month on the creation of a federal assistance fund for housing construction that will become the owner of all lands unneeded by federal structures on the edges of cities and will transfer the lands to municipal authorities for housing construction. State landowners may lose up to 70 percent of the land suitable for housing construction on the edge of cities, experts estimate.
Federal state agencies, federal state unitary enterprises, the Russian Academy of Sciences and affiliates of and organizations founded by the Academy of Sciences will be liable to giving up their lands. A moratorium through the end of the year has been imposed on all operations with federal lands located within 30 km. of cities with populations of 1 million or more, within 15 km. of cities with population between 100,000 and 1 million and within 5 km. of cities and settlements with populations up to 100,000.
The presidential decree was preceded by government resolution No. 234, with the same title, signed in April by former prime minister Viktor Zubkov. Medvedev initiated the resolution after a meeting of the presidium of the council on the implementation of national projects at which he called the use of “millions of hectares” of federal land “inefficient” and suggested they would be better used for housing. The government is to prepare a bill on the use of those lands by September 1. Up to 1 million residential buildings may be built on those lands per year. A similar project already exists for municipal and regional lands.
Leonid Bandorin of the Institute for Urban Economics noted that land belonging to the Defense Ministry and Academy of Sciences, as well as federal land now used for agriculture, is least effectively used.
www.kommersant.com
All the Article in Russian as of May 08, 2008
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