The liberal opposition party Glas said on Friday it would propose forming a dedicated state agency tasked with merging land and cadastral registers, and also called for using EU funds to upgrade the country's outdated railway network.
Leader of Glas, Anka Mrak-Taritas, warned that Croatia’s land registers are still in disarray, a problem plaguing the country’s administration for decades. She said that out of 3,351 cadastre areas in the country, only five percent had been sorted out so far, and added that if the current rate of unifying cadastres continues, it would take 150 years to finish the job.
Glas proposes that a dedicated agency is formed to do that job, Mrak-Taritas told reporters in a news conference in Parliament on Friday, where Glas holds 4 out of 151 seats.
“The government has a duty to solve that problem, and until this is done foreign investors will avoid Croatia,” she said, adding that her party would formally put forward a bill proposing this agency.
Commenting on protests against the climate crisis, scheduled to take place in several Croatian cities later on Friday, Mrak-Taritas sad that while other countries had serious policies on climate change, in Croatia “we act as if that problem does not exist.”
At the same presser, party’s MP Nada Turina-Djuric warned that Croatia’s rail network is in poor condition, illustrated by the fact that a train ride from capital Zagreb to the northern Adriatic port city of Rijeka today takes four hours, whereas some 30 years ago it took three and a half hours.
She said that party member and former MEP Jozo Rados had called for EU funding to be be used to modernise the regional rail network.
“That should have been the basis for launching talks with Slovenia on the modernisation of the rail network, to connect the port of Rijeka and the Slovenian Adriatic coast. However, everything was put on hold, due to the border dispute between the two countries,” she said.
“Both countries would benefit from such an agreement, as would all Central European countries,” she said.
