You won’t surprise anyone with rallies in Cherkasy, but the recent one scared some. People protested against the illegal felling of healthy trees in the forest park zone near Lisova Prosik and Stepan Bandera (former Mozhaiskyi) streets. This is the Sosnivka area, where you can still relax and admire the remnants of the natural landscape. And not one or two trees were cut down here, but more than 260! It is difficult to say what the developers from the private enterprise “Dniprobud Center” were thinking when the saw bit into the pines.
According to the participants of the meeting, the representative of the company, who came to talk with the outraged people, brazenly said: “Rally, shout, you still won’t achieve anything. All rights are on our side. We have all the permits.” The destroyers of nature, it turns out, are sure of their rightness. The history of this issue goes back many years. Back in 2007, the then-deputy corps headed by Mayor Serhiy Odarich passed an irresponsible decision “On providing a private enterprise with a plot of land for rent near the intersection of St. Lisova Prosika and st. Mozhaisky”. So they turned on the green light for the development of the plot, which belongs to the zone of green spaces for public use. And four years later, through changes to the city’s general plan, this plot of land was included in the territory of residential development.
However, time passed, and the construction, which was supposed to start no later than a year from the day of its adoption, according to the aforementioned decision, was postponed for various reasons. That is, the new chairman and the deputy corps could find reasons to terminate the agreement in the interests of the community. However, they did not do this. Today, the city mayor Anatoliy Bondarenko renounces “that irresponsible” decision, looks for reasons that prevented him from doing the right thing. Here are the decisions of the Cherkasy District Administrative Court and the Sixth Court of Appeal, to which the entrepreneur appealed. According to the mayor, they canceled the decision of the executive committee and obliged the department of architecture and urban planning to provide the future developer with urban planning conditions and restrictions. The courts, obviously, acted according to the logic of an entrepreneur who was given a plot of land with an area of 12,176 square meters. meters was officially leased for a period of 49 years “for the location and further operation of townhouses”.
However, in 2017, the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning developed changes to the general development plan of Cherkasy, which could return the plot of land on Lisova Prosica to the park zone, explains Bondarenko. And the timely adoption of these corrections at the session could interfere with those court decisions. Unfortunately, the deputies did not take into account the nuances of the situation at the time, and the elected members of the new term of office in 2021 already voted for changes to the general plan. So the entrepreneur had a formal right to achieve his goal. And I succeeded: from almost a hectare of the park zone, only chips remained.
“But even after the court decisions, no one gave permission to destroy the trees. In the urban development conditions and restrictions, which, according to the resolution, the department issued, the maximum permissible percentage of the development of the land plot was 20, – the mayor writes on social networks. — Every entrepreneur must be responsible for his actions and the damage he has caused to society. Therefore, within the limits of our powers, we will make every effort to make the developer answer for what he has done.”
This is where it is worth considering. After all, the official’s noble anger would have been much more appropriate if he had stopped the destroyers of nature in time. And so it turns out that the pathos of city officials is more like crocodile tears. And they have enough authority to call a negligent developer to order. This was confirmed by the session of the city council, which considered this issue at the request of the citizens to stop the arbitrariness of the entrepreneur and bring the culprits to justice. Deputies, as well as invited city activists, were outraged by the destruction of the forest. For example, deputy Serhiy Shmygol, who prepared the draft decision on this issue, noted: “Unfortunately, we will not return the cut trees. But we need to look for grounds for canceling the lease agreement so that, in accordance with the intended purpose, it is the territory of parks and squares.”
Ihor Afanasiev, a participant in the hostilities, emphasized: “When the war continues and the invader destroys everything, this cannot be allowed. We want to restore this area. We demand that the compensation funds for this felling be returned to the city budget.”
The director of the architecture and urban planning department of the city council, Artur Savin, noted that he considers cutting down trees illegal, and there are grounds for terminating the lease agreement with the developer.
In the end, the session made a decision to cancel the urban development conditions and restrictions on the development of this land plot and instructed the department of architecture and urban planning to prepare an application for the termination of the lease agreement in connection with the violation of the terms of the agreement.
However, not everything is so clear-cut. The head of the legal department of the city council, Kateryna Pydorich, had a different opinion, who warned: “I cannot guarantee that we will be able to terminate this contract, because the evidence still needs to be studied. The developer can file a claim to secure his own claim, then today’s decision will be suspended.” The official noted that the developer allegedly had the right to cut down such a number of trees, as he had submitted a notice of the start of preparatory construction works.
So, having promised to “correct the mistakes made”, the deputies may again encounter the same obstacles from their own mistakes, as has already happened. Anatoly Bondarenko claims in the post that “for several years in a row, our team opposed the beginning of construction in this place.” However, as early as 2016, as evidenced by publications in online publications, he withdrew the appeal of the Cherkasy City Council, which tried to collect additional funds from the tenant through the court. Failure to pay a little more than 300,000 hryvnias (that’s how much the tenant had to pay as underpayment and fines for renting the plot) could be grounds for terminating the lease agreement. But she didn’t. One can only guess about the reasons.
Finally. “We must use all possible levers of influence so that this socially important issue is resolved for the benefit of Cherkasy residents,” city officials insist. Good words. Only time will tell whether official indifference and irresponsibility are behind them this time.
