Barutana on Vodno: the draft plan has collected positive opinions, while the landslide study is only now being commissioned

The draft plan for Barutana on Vodno, the mountain above Skopje, has already collected its positive opinions: from the City of Skopje, the Water Supply and Sewerage utility, the Cadastre, the Interior Ministry, the Protection and Rescue Directorate, the water and nature departments at the Ministry of Environment and several other institutions. The study that is supposed to say whether the slope is even stable, however, has yet to be commissioned.

The mayor of Centar municipality, Goran Gerasimovski, promised at a press briefing that the plan won't go before the council "until we find a lawful and acceptable solution to all the open questions", above all the stability of the terrain and the access road. The planning firm will have to commission a separate study from the Faculty of Civil Engineering on the risk of erosion, landslides and slope instability. "With Vodno we have to be especially careful," he said.

What the draft provides for. According to Gerasimovski, the total building area is being cut from 43,429 to 29,439 square metres, or by 33.3 percent, while the share of greenery on building plots rises from 20 to 40 percent. There are no new plots - the ones from the previous planning documentation, which has existed for this area since 2002, are being kept. Most have already been built on, leaving 13 undeveloped plots, earmarked for individual houses with no more than four residential units.

Why make a new plan at all? Because the previous one was annulled in 2025, and the municipality, the mayor says, is legally obliged to start a new procedure. That, he adds, doesn't mean the plan has to be adopted. There will be a second public consultation on the road layout, and the municipality will neither clear the land nor pay for the planned streets with municipal money.

There is already a petition against the plan, and citizens' initiatives are demanding it be withdrawn. SDSM leader Venko Filipče said that "not a single brick will be laid on Vodno" while he is party leader.

Less concrete and more greenery is better than more concrete. But the order of things remains strange. The stability of the slope isn't a formality to be added at the end, after all the stamps - it's the first question. If the Faculty of Civil Engineering's study shows a risk, what are all the positive opinions gathered before it worth? And why wasn't it commissioned before the stamp-collecting began?