Skopje mayor Orce Gjorgjievski has announced the start of works to rebuild "Zagrebska" Street in Karpos - an artery that spent years in bad shape, walked daily by thousands of residents, including the route to the children's Institute for Respiratory Diseases in Kozle. Good news, no question. The only question is how much of everything announced alongside it will actually happen.

For "Zagrebska" specifically, the plan is clear: a full rehabilitation of the roadway and a retaining wall about 50 metres long and 4 metres high to shore up the ground's stability. That's a measurable, concrete project - exactly the kind residents can later check to see whether it's done or not.

But around that concrete bit, the announcement is stuffed with far more promises. The bridge on "Ljubljanska", they say, has been "unblocked" after years of being stalled. The "Momin Potok" interchange - same. Three bridges are going up. And the most ambitious of all: a park of around 70,000 square metres between the "Ilinden" and "Ljubljanska" boulevards. All of it packed into one announcement, under the slogan "the work is our signature".

Here's where healthy skepticism kicks in. "Unblocked" and "in an advanced phase" are words every mayor in every term delivers with the same enthusiasm. The gap between an announcement and a ribbon-cutting can run several years, or a whole term. Zagrebska with a retaining wall is something you can verify; a 70,000-square-metre park between two boulevards is a promise whose fate we'll know only when we see grass, not a render.

So the best response to announcements like this is neither applause nor a sneer - it's writing it down. Zagrebska, the retaining wall, the Ljubljanska bridge, the Momin Potok interchange, the 70,000-square-metre park - there's the list. A year from now it's worth pulling out and checking point by point. Because "the work is the signature" only if the signature matches what was actually built.