The Bitola municipality has launched intensive construction work on Kozara Street - the same street that for more than a year was the target of complaints from residents and shop owners over unstable surfaces and stalled reconstruction. The current phase is stabilizing the unstable subsoil beneath the roadway and consolidating the base - a preparatory step before the later excavation, compaction, edging, drainage and asphalting.

Besides Kozara, the reconstruction will continue on "Chede Filipovski" Street. The whole project covers several streets: Pande Nikolov, 11 March, Kozara, a branch of Kozara, and Chede Filipovski - all within the "Central City Zone, Part 1" ring. That's a protected zone with a detailed urban plan, which usually means bureaucracy. The municipality confirms: the delays came precisely from collecting the documentation.

How big is the budget and when is completion expected? The municipality avoids saying. That's a standard move - the start is announced, the finish is not. Residents are used to a scene where every construction machine means "before elections" or "before the end of the mandate." In Bitola's case, the local government is stable, and the reconstruction of these streets is actually expected to finish. The question is - how many years later?

For Bitola, Kozara isn't just a street - it's part of the central area where work, commerce and pedestrian traffic happen. The unstable surface of the street these past three or four years has created real damage - dented vehicles, fallen pedestrians, businesses losing customers because their premises were hard to reach. Now something is being done, which makes it clear this was never a "quick project" but something successive municipal administrations had been dodging until it became impossible to postpone any further.