The public presentation of the draft detailed urban plan for the Barutana site on the slopes of Vodno took place in a tense atmosphere, with moments of verbal conflict. It peaked when Biljana Ivanovska, former head of the State Commission for the Prevention of Corruption, pulled out sheets of paper.

She had first asked the representatives of Centar municipality's urban planning department how many times they had been to the site. When they told her at least 20 or 30 times, she stood up.

"Since you have been there that many times, and you are aware and you know everything, I ask you to sign a statement guaranteeing that people's lives will not be put in danger. Let us see that nothing will happen. Please, sign," Ivanovska said.

"Sign," she repeated, waiting for a reaction.

Nobody signed. That is the point of the move - what was being asked for was not a document, but the difference between a professional department's opinion and personal responsibility for it.

Two versions of the same plan

The draft plan for city quarter J05 envisages 25 buildings with a total residential area of 29,000 square metres, ground floor plus two storeys.

The municipality and the residents who support the plan point to a different figure: under the new solution, permitted construction drops from 43,429 to 29,459 square metres - 33 percent less than previously allowed. Their argument is that Barutana has had no detailed plan for years, so it has no streets, no access to homes and no utility infrastructure, and that the plan is a precondition for a normal life rather than for concreting the hillside.

The critics measure the same area against a different reference. In their view the plan exceeds the parameters of the General Urban Plan, where far less is permitted, which puts its legality in question. The civic initiative "A Chance for Centar" claims implementation would mean felling around 9,000 square metres of forest on erosion-prone terrain.

Who is passing the ball to whom

Jana Belčeva, a councillor for "A Chance for Centar" in the City of Skopje council, asked the mayor to initiate a review and withdrawal of the positive opinion the city commission issued on 15 October last year.

Đorđievski replied that the plan won the City of Skopje's backing before last year's local elections were over, that is under the previous city administration, and that the whole procedure is run by Centar municipality.

"The City of Skopje only gives an opinion on whether a specific detailed plan complies with the parameters of the General Urban Plan. The City neither adopts nor drafts those plans," he said.

So: Centar municipality says the City gave a positive opinion. The City says the opinion came from the previous administration and that the plan is not its own. The expert commission, which was supposed to establish non-compliance with the General Urban Plan, established none.

Which is why the request for a signature is more precise than any statement made at a session. When three bodies have given an opinion and none of them counts as the one that decided, the only thing missing is a name under the document.

The public consultation runs until 14 September. The draft plan is on display at the Kočo Racin primary school, every working day from 8am to 4pm, where citizens can fill in consultation forms.