In the last month, an incredible government mess has been developing with a new legislation on property fire protection, which is coming to impose unrealistic obligations of huge costs on 1 million property owners, within suffocating deadlines, with the government’s visible targeting that for whatever arises in front of the fires this summer will be the fault of the citizens and not her.
At the heart of this mess is the implementation of a new fire safety regulation for properties located in or near woodland. This regulation was adopted by a joint ministerial decision (CMD) of the ministers of Environment and Energy, Interior and Climate Crisis and Civil Protection on 19 May 2023, i.e. two days before the elections, without going through a consultation or getting the citizens involved and the political parties. And its application would be connected, supposedly, to a digital platform that would be created by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
However, since within ten months the Ministry of the Interior, despite the funds available from the Recovery Fund, failed to develop the platform, on March 15 its officials decided to solve their own inadequacy by activating the new regulation with a circular that burdened the municipalities with the work and asked the citizens, in view of the fire fighting season, to comply with a number of demands within 15 days.
Unachievable measures within 15 days
The new regulation stipulates that from this year’s fire season (started on May 1) all owners of buildings, from barns to houses, on lands located within or within 300 meters of forests, woodlands and grasslands, peri-urban greenery or declared reforestation outside or within the plan are required to ask specialist engineers to prepare a risk assessment report for their building and a technical report which will include the fire protection measures they must take based on the specific regulation. Subsequently, the owners must implement these measures and submit responsible statements in which they will certify that they have implemented them in the municipalities concerned.
The measures to be taken by the owners, as they are introduced as mandatory, are to fence all the buildings existing in the above-mentioned lands with a solid wall of reinforced concrete and wire mesh up to 1.5 meters high, to put fireproof shell and fireproof frames on their properties , to cut down all the trees and plants near the building – even shade arbors –, to prune their trees every year based on given mathematical formulas, etc.
For those owners who do not comply with the specific measures or submit a false declaration, draconian fines are foreseen, ranging from 500 to 50,000 euros, depending on the degree of danger and the area of their plot, and two years in prison.
Costly liabilities for 1 million owners
According to a first estimate in Documento by engineer Manos Kranidis, member of the POMIDA Board of Directors and president of POMIDA northern suburbs, all these new obligations concern at least 1 million property owners. According to estimates by local government officials, they concern 30-35% of urban and peri-urban municipalities. According to the Steering Committee of the Technical Chamber of Epirus, which applied the distances of 300 meters from the forest maps, they concern large residential parts of the city of Ioannina and Arta and all the houses of the traditional settlements of Zagori, Metsovo and other mountain municipalities.
The engineer and municipal councilor Andreas Mariatos, who made the corresponding measurement in Kythira, told Documento that the scope of the law covers almost the entire area of the island and 90% of its properties.
The costs imposed by the new legislation on these 1 million property owners are staggering: they start at 500 euros for the first engineer’s report and reach many tens of thousands of euros for the construction of new reinforced concrete and high wire fences and fire protection shells , the supply of special fireproof frames, the cutting of large trees, etc. For example, according to the engineer Elli Georgiadou from Thessaloniki, the fencing with cement bricks, without plaster and paint, without the mesh and without the required signs, for a plot of four acres costs at least 50,000 euros. From there the bill goes up.
Demonstrating a new record of political audacity, the circular issued for the new regulation by the Ministry of the Interior – which for 11.5 months and to this day has not built the digital platform it legislated itself – on March 15 demanded:
From one third of the country’s municipalities that fall under the provisions of the KYA to inform their citizens about the new regulation within 15 days and to create committees composed of specialist scientists (many municipalities do not have them) to collect the citizens’ papers and from the May 1 to start checks.
From the 1 million building owners who have never heard anything about this regulation to find within 15 days some “experts” and pay 500 each for the risk and fire protection studies to submit them to the municipalities. Then to issue work permits and to fence off a huge part of the country with a high wall and barbed wire, paying tens of thousands of euros each. All this within 30 days, from April 1st to 30th.
Storm of reactions for “individual responsibility”
The audacity to ask a government that in recent years left half of Greece to burn with hundreds of municipalities and 1 million citizens something visibly unachievable raised strong reactions against the provisions of the KYA from all involved: public engineers (PO EMDYDAS), private individuals engineers, the association of property owners POMIDA but also the KEDE, which is supposed to be in charge of implementing the new legislation.
Engineers and POMIDA asked the Ministry of the Interior to review both the provisions of the new fire protection regulation and its deadlines, pointing out that the logic of the regulation moving in the direction of the individual responsibility of property owners seeks to shift the responsibility of the state for forest protection to the citizens , burdening them with huge red tape and exorbitant costs. POMIDA and private engineers insisted, above all, that the Ministry of Interior take back the provision for cementing the entire countryside with high paddocks which, in addition to their huge cost, if there is a fire, will not stop the flames but will prevent the rescue, as it happened in the eye.
The KEDE, for its part, initially refused to implement the new legislation on the grounds that the municipalities do not have the specialist scientists nor were they given the necessary resources for its implementation. But it is unclear whether it will persist in its refusal for long, as the ND-affiliated president Lazaros Kyrizoglou, while stating that KEDE reserves the right to file an appeal of unconstitutionality for the new regulation to the Council of State, very carefully linked this move to the lack of resources alone – leaving a loophole open to implement the law if the resilience fee imposed on overnight stays in accommodation of all types is transferred to municipalities, as he has requested.
There are no forms, deadlines are expiring
Faced with a wave of backlash from engineers, property owners and municipalities, the Ministry of Energy and Environment issued a clarifying circular on April 19 in which it took a half-step back – solely in terms of deadlines and not the requirements of the new legislation.
In particular, he clarified that the new property fire protection regulation excludes agricultural warehouses in crops, but all other obligations for property owners remain in force, with the deadline for the risk assessment report and the technical report being extended until May 10. for passive fire protection measures and the submission of the declaration to the municipality by June 10 and for active fire protection measures – paddocks, fireproof shells, frames, cutting trees, etc. if we read the circular correctly – to be extended until March 2025.
Absolute hell
Documento asked the engineer M. Kranidis and the engineer and municipal councilor Andr. Mariato on the real meaning of the circular and how they see the situation now.
“No one has understood what is valid and what is not, it is the absolute alalum. The deadline for property owners to submit the studies and reports is Friday and the forms that the engineers are supposed to fill out aren’t even there yet.” emphasizes M. Kranidis and continues: “We all agree that there should be fire protection measures, we should clear the plots, we should have water supply available in case of fire, but all this with fireproof shells and walls imposed on property owners is extreme. Has the state applied any of these to public buildings to impose them on private ones?”
They are preparing appeals
For his part, A. Mariatos notes: “As far as crop buildings are concerned, I doubt whether their exemption can be ensured since there is no national crop register. With the circular a credit of time is given but the obligations are not cancelled, they remain the same. The problem is that we have a horizontal law where specialized legislation would be needed. We really don’t know what will happen because KEDE refused to implement the law but has not announced so far that it will appeal to the Supreme Court. It is important to stand against the law and we hope to see something like this in the coming days from the side of some scientific bodies”.
The law will therefore not be implemented at the moment but remains in force as the Ministry of the Interior refuses to take back the provisions on corrals and other high-cost anti-environmental measures as requested by POMIDA and engineers.
Faced with this uproar, individual property owners are now attempting to respond by gathering signatures online to suspend the regulation. A common point in the comments of the citizens who sign is that they feel that they have been confronted with an “outrageous”, “irrational”, “obscene” and “unscientific legislation”, which they attribute to some “unemployed rednecks” in the Ministry of the Interior who “want to give new sources of income for engineers” and “to transfer the obligations of the state for fire protection to the citizens”. This political choice, however, they conclude, leads to the economic exsanguination of property owners, which now far exceeds the endurance of Greek society.
#Unthinkable #tax #real #estate #fire #protection
