Zagreb Mayor Tomislav Tomasevic on Friday held his first official meeting with Reconstruction Fund head Damir Vandjelic, with both describing it as constructive and announcing a more intensive cooperation to step up the reconstruction of the capital after last year's earthquake.

One of the first moves will be the introduction of mobile teams who will help people whose homes were damaged in the tremor fill out reconstruction applications.

That will increase the number of applications which the city sends to the construction ministry as well as the number of decisions on the applications which the ministry sends to the Reconstruction Fund, Tomasevic told the press after the meeting.

The whole reconstruction process needs to be stepped up, both at the organisational and the administrative level, for things to really get going, he said.

Tomasevic said the city would help the Reconstruction Fund step up the inspection of damaged buildings that had not been checked yet and that this would be done in the next few weeks.

The mayor said he expected the state’s support and that the city had enough human resources to help both the Fund and the ministry if necessary. The city will do all it can for reconstruction to be stepped up and it will be a good partner to all institutions involved, he added.

Vandjelic said they had discussed “all the bottlenecks” in the post-earthquake reconstruction of Zagreb and agreed measures to step it up.

He said reconstruction was too slow as citizens had filed 11,400 reconstruction applications, while the construction ministry had sent the Reconstruction Fund only 20 decisions.

In order for all applications to be processed by the end of the year, the Fund should be receiving 80 decisions a day, not one to two a week as in the past three weeks, he added.