The public consultation on the draft Detailed Urban Plan for the Barutana site on Vodno closes today - the plan that provides for clearing forest to build dozens of two-storey houses. A petition against it has collected more than 1,500 signatures.

The former head of the State Commission for Prevention of Corruption and candidate for mayor of Centar municipality, Biljana Ivanovska, called the plan damaging and unacceptable. Her objection started with history.

"It would be good if the mayor learned the history of the city, particularly the period when the villages of Dolno and Gorno Vodno were resettled and the hill was forested so it would not flood the city", Ivanovska wrote, addressing Centar mayor Goran Gerasimovski.

The forest on Vodno is not scenery. It is infrastructure.

That is the point that turns the whole dispute on its head. Vodno was not forested by accident. The hill was planted precisely so it would stop carrying water down onto the city - people were moved out of two villages so that forest could exist. When part of that forest is cut, what is lost is not greenery. It is a function.

The petition states: "This plan creates the conditions for a future disaster in the form of landslides, erosion or flash flooding. No opinion on this plan was given by the Directorate for Protection and Rescue. There is no study for this plan and no measures on how to prevent erosion or landslides."

The plan they voted through without a hazard assessment

The chronology says the most. On 14 July 2026, councillors from VMRO-DPMNE and SDSM in the Centar municipal council jointly voted the plan through - even though the representative of the private planning firm that drafted it, "Bild urban", stated that the plan had not received an opinion from the Directorate for Protection and Rescue regarding the hazard. Councillors from "Chance for Centar", Levica and ZNAM voted against, along with one councillor each from SDSM and VMRO-DPMNE.

The explanation was that an opinion had been requested and no answer received, so the procedure continued because a plan may be prepared in the absence of a negative opinion. That is a legal reading in which an institution's silence counts as consent - on erosive terrain, above a city of half a million people.

The president of the Centar municipal council, Violeta Velkovska, offered the name of the site itself as her argument for the stability of the ground: "Barutana is stable, the very name Barutana tells you there was once a gunpowder store there, and a gunpowder store is built where there is no water inflow. There are no landslides there, no erosion." A toponym as geological expertise - that is a sentence that deserves to stay on the record.

Who pays for the plans

Architect and Levica councillor in the Skopje city council, Andrea Jankov, pointed to where the whole problem begins: "There is no public interest if the plan is financed by a private party who wants to build a building. It is incomprehensible that Centar municipality cannot set aside money to produce the plans itself. It takes 800,000 euros a year for this purpose, and the municipality has a budget of 20 million euros."

Eight hundred thousand out of twenty million. Four percent of the budget - for the municipality to decide for itself how building happens on its own territory, instead of that being paid for by whoever wants the permit. When the investor pays the planner, the plan answers the question the investor asked.

Mayor Gerasimovski did not turn up at the public hearing on 3 September - the slot clashed with a press conference about a music event. Neither did the councillors who voted the plan through. Skopje mayor Orce Gjorgjievski announced he would summon the relevant commission to examine the options for withdrawing it, stressing that he is against any construction on Vodno.

Once the consultation closes, a final version gets drawn up incorporating the accepted objections, and the plan goes back to a vote in the Centar council. Which objections get accepted - that will be the real answer to the question of whose interest is being defended.