Kopaonik may lose status of national park

The Minister of Environment and Spatial Planning, Oliver Dulić, estimated that "Kopaonik has never been dirtier and that it may lose the status of a national park within the next few months".

- It is possible that we will lose National Park Kopaonik within next few months, and that is why we need to reinforce supervision and the nature protection measures - Dulić told Tanjug after the meeting with the representatives of the municipalities of Brus and Raška, National Park Kopaonik, "Skijališta Srbije" and the Nature Preservation Institute, which was held on Kopaonik mountain.

The Minister announced that Kopaonik would obtain trash-collecting truck through the "Let's Clean Serbia" campaign, as well as sufficient number of containers and dust bins.

Dulić said that the representatives of public utility companies had promised at the meeting that they would reinforce the work on cleaning the mountain in association with private hotel keepers.

According to his words, 24-hour attendance and cleaning were agreed on at the meeting, and the question of serious wastewater pollution was raised because the capacities of public utility companies and public utility services on Kopaonik became insufficient long time ago when it comes to number of beds, which led to the fact that "feces water flows down the mountain".

- The problem of sewerage is huge, and its capacities are about 40% smaller than the existing connections that have been built over the last 20 years - said Dulić.

He estimated that it was necessary to build the unit for wastewater treatment, as well as new factory for production of drinking water, which would be the investments for year 2010 and 2011, and the project should be finished prior to February 2010.

The Minister pointed out that the municipality, private hotel keepers and the state must invest funds in construction of the wastewater treatment unit, which should enable further construction and expansion of capacities on Kopaonik in the future.

Dulić reminded that his Ministry had promised to prevent illegal construction by having the illegal facilities torn down and criminal charges pressed against their owners.

He said that there were thousands of illegally built facilities on Kopaonik and appealed to the citizens to submit the requests for legalization because that would be "simpler and cheaper than to pay huge taxes on houses that will be torn down in the future".

- Every kind of illegal construction is absolutely unacceptable - said Dulić and added that only 120 legalization requests had been submitted to the date.