Olomouc refuses to continue paying inflated prices for land acquisitions

Olomouc - The Olomouc city hall refuses to continue paying exorbitant amounts for the purchase of land for public utility constructions that private landowners often demand. According to the city officials, some of them are inflating prices to up to one hundred times the estimated value. Their behavior borders on extortion, said Mayor Martin Novotný in a statement to ČTK.
The city hall, according to him, is encountering disproportionately high prices, especially when purchasing land for new bike paths. "Landowners, on which grass grows and which could normally be sold for amounts in the tens of crowns per square meter, simply said that their partner is the city, which needs to realize something in the public interest, and therefore will be easily extortable. They are trying to gain hundreds of thousands or millions," Novotný stated.
The city hall was previously forced to accept unfavorable conditions for projects that were underway and for which the city had obtained subsidies. As an example, the mayor cited the project for the reconstruction and completion of the sewage network, for which the city hall secured nearly 1.1 billion crowns from the Cohesion Fund and the EU Fund for Cohesion.
"At this moment, we will cut ourselves off from this practice and will no longer send some crafty fellow citizens gifts worth hundreds of thousands or millions of crowns for their fields or meadows," emphasized Novotný.
He added that the city hall will have to delay some projects in the area of building bike paths due to this decision. However, the city administration expects that this will ultimately lead landowners to reduce their prices.