In the yard of the Stiv Naumov primary school in Bitola, a sports hall worth 48,297,406 denars is going up. That money buys 650 square metres - a hall with a 15 by 30 metre court, 7.6 metres high, changing rooms, an office and toilets. The same standard-design building is due to go to the Todor Angelevski primary school and to the Dame Gruev branch school in Dolno Orizari.

Mayor Toni Konjanovski inspected the works together with the officials responsible. This is the phase of a project where a concrete slab gets photographed - and where there is a great deal of talk about square metres and very little about deadlines.

Why it fell behind

One admission in the press release is worth more than all the rest of the statistics: construction was slowed for a period because the HVAC design had to be amended and brought into line with energy efficiency standards. In other words - the design was drawn up, tendered and started, and only then was it established that the HVAC section did not meet the standards in force.

That is not a construction problem. That is a design and supervision problem, and it is paid for in time. When the building in question is a standard design that will be repeated twice more in the same municipality, the question of whether the mistake was fixed once or will recur in the next two projects is entirely practical - and it is answered nowhere.

The funding comes through the second government call from the Ministry of Education and Science, topped up from the Municipality of Bitola's budget. In parallel, a multifunctional sports hall of 386 square metres is being built in Bistrica, with a ground floor and a gallery, worth 37,599,966 denars - a building that, according to the municipality, sat unusable for decades. The gallery keeps its original purpose, as a space for watching cultural events.

Four halls, nearly 86 million denars for just the two with a published price. For a city that has spent years with children doing physical education in a corridor or on asphalt when it rains, this is a project that makes sense. The measure of success, though, will not be the ribbon-cutting - it will be whether the hall in Dolno Orizari opens in the same school year as the one in town, or waits for the next government call.