UPDATE OF ADDRESS REGISTER – THREE MILLION CITIZENS OF SERBIA WITHOUT STREET ADDRESSES
The presentation of the project Updating Address Register in the Republic of Serbia was held in Nis today. The project is being implemented under the auspices of the Prime Minister of the Republic of Serbia, and is being implemented by the Ministry of Construction, Transport and Infrastructure, the Ministry of State Administration and Local Self-Government and the Republic Geodetic Authority. Nis City Mayor met with the representatives of the above mentioned institution and expressed his full support to the realization of this project which was very important for the citizens and pointed out that a lot had already been done regarding the renaming, so that there were no streets in Nis with the same name. When it comes to giving names to the streets in the rural area the Mayor said this was an opportunity to show respect and gratitude to many people, especially those who have lost their lives in war-related events in the past decades, primarily in the communities in which they lived, of course, with the consent of the family. The discussion also emphasized that the costs of the technical procedure, the making of signboards with street names and house numbers will be borne by the State, so that this process would cost the citizens very little. The only thing that citizens would have to do by themselves was to make changes in personal documents. According to the data of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, 3,028,020 citizens have registered residence in the streets without a specific home number, out of which 2,676,898 citizens have been registered at the addresses for which no street name has been specified (known as “No Street bb”). The estimation is that, in the territory of Serbia, there are 47,000 street names missing as well as a million house numbers, said Vukasin Grozdic, Advisor to the Serbian Prime Minister. The address register has data on street names and house numbers and is one of the key state registers in addition to the register of companies, the register of the population and the register of real estate. The Republic Geodetic Authority is in charge of maintaining the address register, but the registration of the address is carried out on the basis of formal decisions of the units of local self-governments on giving the name of the street. The Law on Local Self-Government prescribes the original jurisdiction of local self-government in the allocation of the name of streets, squares and alleys. At the end of last year, the Government of Serbia formed a coordinating body for the improvement of the address register, which includes all relevant ministries and organizations. It is estimated that the total cost of updating the register and marking streets and home numbers will be 5 million euros. It is expected that at the end of 2018 a unified public procurement will be announced for all street and house numbers in the territory of Serbia. The marking will last from November to the end of April 2019. Local services and state authorities (police department, tax administration departments) will successively align their database with the updated registry.