Two Skopje municipalities have opened compensation schemes after the severe storm. The conditions are not the same, and the deadlines differ by a factor of two.

Centar municipality published a public call for one-off financial assistance to individuals and legal entities that suffered material damage. The call runs for two months. Owners of property in the municipality who suffered damage to roof structures and facades are eligible. A commission of council and administration representatives has been formed, which mayor Goran Gerasimovski presented as a guarantee of a transparent and objective procedure.

Karpoš municipality is also accepting claims - but the deadline is 30 days from the date the damage occurred. The assessment and compensation procedure, they say, will be carried out in cooperation with the government and the City of Skopje.

What you have to submit in Karpoš

The form is collected from the municipal registry or downloaded from the official website. Completed, with the full set of documents, it is submitted to the registry on working days from 7:30 to 15:00. Required: a photocopy of a valid ID card or travel document, a photocopy of the property deed as proof of ownership, photographs of the site showing the damage, and a police report on the damage sustained.

Residents who have already filed claims will be contacted by municipal services to complete their documentation.

The police report is the bottleneck

Read that list again. The fourth item is a police report. That means that while the wind was tearing sheet metal off your roof, on top of clearing up and covering the hole, you were also supposed to call the police to record it - on a day when the police were being called out to dozens of locations across the city.

Without that report, you have no claim. And it is a condition you only find out about once the storm has passed and the clock is already running.

A deadline that is already running

Thirty days in Karpoš, two months in Centar. The same storm, the same city, two different timeframes. The hardest hit are precisely those who struggle most to gather documents - older people, people with unresolved property deeds, residents of buildings where the damage is to a shared roof.

Gerasimovski noted that after the storm all municipal services were immediately mobilised, a crisis headquarters was convened, and crews removed dangerous sheet metal and fallen trees around the clock. That is the part that worked.

The administrative part is what now decides who actually gets compensated. Collecting documents is slower than clearing roofs - and the deadline doesn't know that.