Improved property management in Krusevac and Aleksinac

The project "Public Property Management in the Function of Local Development", which was implemented in partnership of the City of Krusevac and the Municipality of Aleksinac, was successfully implemented, and the results were presented on June 17 in Krusevac. The project was funded by the European Union through the Exchange 5 Program, and the value of the donation was 176,300 euros. The project was implemented during the previous 18 months, and aimed to establish the basis for efficient property management in both local self-governments, through the completion of the inventory of public property, improving the knowledge and technical capacity of local self-governments in the field of public property management, and establishing adequate structures that will deal with management.

"Property in Serbia has changed its owner over the years, so the possibility for its use has been reduced. With the financial support of the European Union and the Government of Serbia, the City of Krusevac and the Municipality of Aleksinac have made a significant leap in real estate registration, through hundreds of listed buildings and tens of kilometers of underground infrastructure that is listed, geodetically processed, registered, and the value is officially estimated", said Vesna Lazarevic, Deputy Mayor of Krusevac.

"After successful trainings by the most prominent experts in property registration, we have knowledge left, standards have been improved that will bring benefit to us and our partner, but also all public companies and institutions in both local self-governments" she said, adding that through four modular trainings, over 20 employees from both local self-governments and public companies met and began to apply modern principles of property management.

The Mayor of Aleksinac, Nenad Stankovic, said that the biggest benefit of this project for that municipality is the recorded water supply network in rural settlements, and the development of software for public property management which, as he said, will be used by local self-government officials and stakeholders.

Milijana Zdravkovic Mihailov, project manager, pointed out that property management is a complex and somewhat problematic process for all local self-governments that implement it.

"Local self-governments are obliged by law to transfer the property that was managed by the Republic to the local level. It is not an easy job because a lot of property that is already being owned by Krusevac and Aleksinac is not actually owned by them, or there is no evidence that it was once bought, built, because it is property that originates from the 70s and 80s. One of the biggest challenges we faced was to obtain all the paperwork related to certain property, in order to submit a request to the Cadaster for registration of property rights to certain real estate", said Zdravkovic Mihailov.

During the project, officials from both local self-governments electronically registered about 2,100 properties. In the local databases of public property, created through purpose-built software, 23,411 real estates were registered in Krusevac and 10,030 in Aleksinac.

By collecting and verifying extensive documentation, and accepting it by the Republic Geodetic Authority, 175 units of public property were transferred to the ownership of two local self-governments and registered in the cadaster. The value of 66 residential and 91 business buildings was determined. Geodetic surveys and works were performed on 87 properties and 15 streets. Geodetic surveys of the underground infrastructure in Krusevac were performed on 21 kilometers of sewage infrastructure, as well as on 4.7 kilometers of heating pipelines, while geodetic surveys of the underground infrastructure in Aleksinac included 27.5 kilometers of water supply, mostly rural.

The project "Public Property Management in the Function of Local Development" is one of 18 projects implemented under the grant scheme of the EXCHANGE 5 program. The program is funded by the European Union under IPA 2014, and implemented by the Ministry of Public Administration and Local Self-Government in cooperation with the Standing Conference of Towns and Municipalities (SCTM) as implementing partner. The contracting authority for all grant scheme projects is the Ministry of Finance, i.e. the Sector for Contracting and Financing Programs from European Union Funds (CFCU).