|
|
Ethiopia: First Meeting for New City Lease Board This Week
 |
|
|||||||||
|
||||||||||
Addis Fortune (Addis Ababa)
1 July 2008
Posted to the web 1 July 2008
Wudineh Zenebe
The just established Addis Abeba City Government Land Development and Administration Authority Lease Board, under the chairmanship of Mayor Kuma Demeksa, is to hold its first meeting this week. City General Manager, Mekuria Haile, is its Deputy Chairperson.
In the meeting scheduled for the end of the week, the new eleven-member board would discuss what to prioritize and what procedures to follow, sources told Fortune.
The board members are predominantly from the General Manager's office, the newly established Works and Urban Development Bureau and Trade and Industry Bureau. As an executing institute, the Land Development and Administration Authority is not allowed to be member of the board, but can participate as an advisory body.
In subsequent meetings, the board will discuss agendas preset by the authority, which wants the board to make decisions on incomplete cases.
These include the case of 200 companies that deposited more than two million Birr each in closed accounts since the Caretaker Administration, and still are waiting to be granted the land they requested, according to the source.
The Caretaker Administration's lease board, whose failure to deal with land issues had been a point of frequent criticism, has, on average, passed decisions on only 150 similar cases each year.
"As the new city administration expects a lot of money from land and land-related sources, it is expected to pass a lot of decisions," an official from the administration told Fortune.
The authority plans to develop 2000hct to be auctioned in the next fiscal year. Of these, 365.4hct will be auctioned by the city administration while the remaining will be taken care of by districts.
Of this land, 600hct is located in the industrial zones, 80hct along the Debre Zeit Road, in various sites identified in the city's master plan for industrial purposes, as well as in city centre renewal sites.
An employee of the authority is, however, skeptical about the success of the plan.
The record transfer of developed lands over the past 20 years is 500hct per annum.
"The current plan is ambitious and the fact that it (the authority) wants to transfer the lands only at auctions will create problems in resettling the town center dwellers," he told Fortune.
The Kuma-led city administration, nonetheless, does not seem to have the slightest worry about this matter. It expects to generate 2.5 billion Br from the auction to be undertaken at municipality level in which the initial price for a square metre plot will be around 3,000 Br.
The authority has submitted a 2.2 Billion Br budget request to the city Finance and Economic Development Bureau for its planned endeavours to ready the land with the necessary infrastructure put in place and to undertake other capital projects.
|
The authority, which had not previously asked for budget for capital projects during the Caretaker Administration, is one of the four infrastructures development institutes of the city that each requested a record high budget last week for their plans in the coming fiscal year.
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Copyright © 2008 Addis Fortune. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections -- or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Make allAfrica.com your home page | RSS Feed | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Top | Site Guide | Who We Are | Advertising | Search | Subscribe | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Questions or Comments? Contact us. Read our Privacy Statement. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
