At the public presentation of the draft detailed urban plan for the "Barutana" site on the slopes of Vodno, the former head of the State Commission for the Prevention of Corruption, Biljana Ivanovska, handed representatives of the Centar municipality's urban planning department blank sheets of paper.

She asked them to sign a statement that the plan is safe for citizens' lives.

"Since you have been there so many times, and you are aware and know everything, I am asking you to sign a statement," she told them.

The call was repeated - "Sign it" - while she waited for a reaction. The presentation ran in a tense atmosphere, with verbal clashes at moments.

What the plan foresees

The draft plan for parcel J05 envisages around 25 new buildings on an area of 29,000 square metres. According to critics, achieving that will require cutting 9,000 square metres of forest, and most of the buildings are houses of 700 to 1,000 square metres.

The municipality has its own argument, and it is not negligible: the plan reduces the buildable area from the previous 43,000 to 29,000 square metres, and respects property rights established after the Constitutional Court struck down an earlier plan.

That is true. But "less concrete than the previous plan" is not the same as "safe". That is a comparison against something that already fell in court.

The question left unanswered

The central objection is not aesthetic. This is erosion-prone land - terrain where cutting forest and loading it with buildings has a direct connection to what happens further down, in the central city area, when it rains.

That is exactly why asking for a signature was not theatre. If the department claims the plan is safe, a signature formalises that claim. And the silence in response to that request says something no document in the procedure says.

Who was in the hall, and who was not

The mayor of Centar municipality, Goran Gerasimovski, did not come to the public hearing. The plan was defended by council president Violeta Velkovska.

Her argument for the terrain's stability was that the name itself says it - there used to be a gunpowder store there.

That somebody once stored gunpowder in a place is not a geological finding. It is a toponym. The procedure for an urban plan on erosion-prone land requires an opinion from the State Geological Survey, not etymology.

The clock is running

The public consultation runs until 14 September. That is the window in which citizens can submit objections - and the only moment in the entire procedure when what a resident of Vodno writes carries formal weight.

The question for the authorities is simple and requires no expertise to ask: does an opinion exist stating that building on this terrain is safe, and if it does, why was it not put on the table in front of the people sitting in that hall?