Sipilä's government took dismantling the bureaucracy as one of its top projects. How is the work progressing in terms of official practices and permit procedures regarding planning and construction?
Text: Juha Salmi
Director of Construction Industry RT Anu Kärkkäinen and INFRA's environmental manager Juha Laurilan still have to clear obstacles in order for the government's deregulation guidelines to be realized.
"From the point of view of the infrastructure sector, it is still progress that the separate permit procedures of the Land Material Act and the Environmental Protection Act concerning the same project have been brought together. If both a soil and an environmental permit are needed in a construction project or at a site where aggregates are taken, applying for one permit has been sufficient since last summer. There is one possible appeal process. This reduces duplicate work on the part of permit applicants and grantors alike," says Laurila.
It is also progress that provincial plans and general plans of municipalities no longer need to be confirmed by the Ministry of the Environment. Court fees for appeals of land use and building permit decisions have been increased and the exceptional jurisdiction of ely centers has been transferred to municipalities.
The role of Ely centers is still unclear
There is still uncertainty about the role of Ely centers and the right to appeal. According to the government program, the centers' right to appeal will be limited and their role will become consultative. "Officials and the business community have different views on what this means. In our opinion, the right of appeal should either be removed or significant limitations should be made to it," says Anu Kärkkäinen.
According to the government program, there would be deadlines for the official processing of the planning process and for obtaining a decision on permission to appeal from the Supreme Court. Now, however, it seems that complaints will significantly delay construction projects in the future as well.
"The appeal decision should be received within the four-month deadline, but unfortunately it seems that this will not happen. The transition from municipal appeal to administrative appeal was also blocked in the report commissioned by YM", laments Kärkkäinen.
Municipality, influence the price of construction!
Municipalities are in an equally important position as the state in norm-breaking talks. Now the municipalities' interpretations in applying the regulations differ too much from each other. It is difficult for the state to catch up, for example, with the number of parking spaces to be built on plots.
"We have proposed that the Land Use and Building Act could at least generally regulate how far the plans can go into the details of planning solutions. If the planner 'draws' the building in the plan in detail, the planning process slows down. This is often followed by exemption applications, which in turn slows down projects. The costs can rise so much that it makes no sense to implement the project. Extremely detailed zoning applies to only a few cities, but their share of new construction projects is already almost half," says Kärkkäinen.
"On the other hand, at the same time, soil recycling areas remain unmarked in the formulas. The clean soil left over during construction should be recycled for new use, but without recycling areas it will not be possible. In order to curb emissions and construction costs, the formula could also define how far away the aggregate needed for construction can be brought to the area under construction," Laurila points out.
Kärkkäinen and Laurila consider the MAL agreements concerning land use, housing and traffic, which the state has agreed with the city regions of Helsinki, Turku, Tampere and Oulu, as a good example of the closer cooperation between the state and municipalities.
One-stop electronic permits
Big hopes are aimed at the flagship project concerning the one-stop shop principle in public administration. The reform, which starts with the legislative project of the Ministry of the Environment, concerns, among other things, building permits, environmental permits, permits according to the Water Act, exceptional decisions according to the Nature Conservation Act and environmental impact assessment. The goal is that the government's presentation on integrated environmental procedures will be in parliament in spring 2018.
"Consultations and application documents must be combined and cooperation between authorities must be increased. The soil extraction permit, environmental permit and environmental impact assessment could be in the same package. You could get a project permit from one box, which includes many smaller permits," summarizes Juha Laurila.
With electronic processing, the process would become open and transparent. The applicant can check at any time where the permit processing is progressing and who is handling it at any given time. "At best, the permit project would have a coordinating authority, a 'project manager' who runs the project approval process: gathers the views and opinions of various authorities, sets a schedule and ensures that it is also kept. Predictability and advance information about processing times are everything for companies."
Anu Kärkkäinen also reminds that it would be in line with the spirit of the government program to have a deadline for processing the permit. "If the authority cannot commit to handling the matter in a certain time, there should at least be a service promise about how long it will take to apply for a certain type of permit. Unnecessary inquiries to the authorities would decrease if you could trust that the work would proceed sensibly and in a reasonable time."
Read in Infra magazine the whole thing ja Minister Kimmo Tiilikainen's assessment of the project's progress!