While the Navigation Safety Inspection from Kotor occasionally fines Briv Construction because some of its vessels, such as the tug "Krsto", allegedly anchor in violation of the provisions of the Navigation Safety Act, which do not allow ships to moor in prohibited places, i.e. outside parts of the water area that have been officially declared as anchorages, at the same time, that inspection turns a blind eye to the identical behavior of several dozen foreign and domestic sailors who also anchor their yachts in all possible and impossible places throughout the Tivat Bay.
State and local authorities continue to play ping-pong with the request of the Briv Construction company from Kotor to allow them to anchor several of their hydro-construction vessels in the part of the Tivat Bay west of the island of Sveti Marko while these vessels are not used for their regular purpose. - construction of coastal infrastructure and other facilities on the sea and coast.
Competent state inspections do not think of inspecting ships and seeing how they deal with waste water and solid waste that passengers and crew on anchored yachts generate every day, but that is why the Environmental Inspection asked Briv Construction back in the spring that the company must carry out a decision-making procedure about the need to prepare an environmental impact assessment because several of its vessels have been anchored for months in Solila bay near the Tivat settlement of Brdišta, in a water area that is outside the usual waterway.
Acting on the opinion of the EPA, Briv turned to the Secretariat for Spatial Planning about twenty days ago with a request to decide on the need to prepare an environmental impact assessment report for the temporary anchorage of its vessels. However, the Municipal Secretariat of Tivat declared itself incompetent for this request and referred it, as stated in the decision, 'for further work and action to the competent authority - the Agency for Nature and Environmental Protection from Podgorica'"
This, bearing in mind the fact that this is a topic that primarily concerns the Law on Navigation Safety, because the anchoring of ships is not the construction of a temporary or permanent facility at sea, is complete nonsense. However, environmental inspector Slavena Vuković did not appreciate the position of the Kotor company that a ship anchored at sea is not and cannot be a construction object or activity for which an environmental impact assessment study should be done. In the minutes, the inspector even replaced the mobile pylons for fixing hydro-construction vessels to the seabed during the execution of works, which are equipped with some of the pontoons of Briv Construction, on that occasion, for alleged piles which, according to her, were driven into the seabed for the purpose of tying the ships.
Briv filed an appeal against the inspector's decision, but the second instance authority - the Ministry of Ecology, Spatial Planning and Urbanism rejected it as unfounded, claiming that the Regulation on projects for which an environmental impact assessment is carried out also includes "infrastructural project - anchoring of ships".
"In fact, List II of the Regulation under item 12 (h) lists the project - other types of ports, including ports for fishing boats, yachts including piers for ferries, as well as infrastructural port facilities," states the Ministry's decision to reject the Kotor company's appeal which, by the way, has the largest fleet of specialized hydro-construction vessels in the country.
The Ministry instructed Briv to contact the "local government body responsible for environmental protection" for a decision on the development of an environmental impact assessment report for the anchoring of its ships in the Tivat Bay. Briv filed a lawsuit against the Ministry's decision to the Administrative Court, pointing out that the anchorage, according to the Law on Maritime Safety, is a designated part of the sea for these purposes, and not the coast that is necessary to build any port on which, as a facility for an assessment of the impact on the environment is needed, in their actions towards this problem, the Environmental Inspection and the Ministry baselessly insist.
At the end of June, Briv also requested an official statement from the Agency for the Protection of Nature and Environment (EPA) about this problem, and on June 15 he received an opinion from that state body that what he is looking for an anchorage for his ships are "activities in the marine environment that may have an impact on the marine ecosystem" and that therefore the Kotor company is obliged to "carry out an environmental impact assessment procedure with the body responsible for environmental protection".
By the way, the EPA has not given such opinions to the very pronounced practice of long-term anchoring of dozens of larger and smaller yachts throughout the Tivat Bay, and even in places where the presence of protected sea grass - posidonia - has been recorded on the bottom.
Acting on the opinion of the EPA, Briv turned to the Secretariat for Spatial Planning about twenty days ago with a request to decide on the need to prepare an environmental impact assessment report for the temporary anchorage of its vessels. However, the Tivat Municipal Secretariat declared itself incompetent for this request and referred it, as stated in the decision, "for further work and action to the competent authority - the Agency for Nature and Environmental Protection from Podgorica".
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