Naiden Zelenogorski: The Committee continues to work in the interest of development of the regions and municipalities

Mr. Zelenogorski, what will be the main legislative changes that you will discuss in the key for the construction industry parliamentary Committee of Regional Policy, Public Works and Local Self-Government in the coming months? At the beginning I want to thank “Stroitel” newspaper that it shows constant interest in the work of the committee. As I stated last year, the Committee of Regional Policy, Public Works and Local Self-Government focuses on the legal basis, as the activities of legislative and executive powers will coordinate, as well as those of regional and municipal administrations in connection with the priorities of the Ministry of Regional Development and Public Works (MRDPW). I want to note that in the past one-year period the committee examined and the National Assembly (NA) adopted several fundamental laws related to the activities of the state and local governments – as I promised in my first interview. Above all, these are the amendments to the Spatial Planning Act (SPA), Public Procurement Act (PPA), Pre-School and School Education Act, Disaster Protection Act, Black Sea Coast Spatial Planning Act, Regional Development Act (RDA). How is your interaction with BCC going? At your first meeting the management of BCC submitted three bills drafted by the branch organization – the Spatial Planning and Regional Development Act, the Construction Act, the Urban Planning Act. When will they fall into the Committee’s agenda? As I said last year, this is a very important and complex issue. The newly adopted amendments to the Public Procurement Act cleared most of the problems. Discussions at expert level continue whether the law can be divided into three parts or despite its large volume it can remain as a single law. In this respect, as you know, there is no consensus on the various guilds and some cases even lead to the desire of some of them to accept openly lobbying texts. Here is also important the opinion of the judiciary, which has already gained enough case law practice on the implementation of the previous law and there may be problems in creating practice in separation of the law. As I mentioned, in the newly adopted by parliament PPA were included the BCC proposals regarding electronic tenders and tender documents.