Ljubljana - The Ljubljana city council has extended by five years the contract for the Bežigrad Sport Park project, which includes renovation of the dilapidated landmark stadium designed by Jože Plečnik. The contractors have welcomed the decision, while a civil initiative opposing the project said private interest had outweighed public interest.

While part of the opposition councillors opposed the decision, the city council on Monday extended the contract with the company Elektronček, owned by businessman Joc Pečečnik, and the Slovenian Olympic Committee.

The property developer Bežigrajski Športni Park (BŠP) welcomed the decision, saying that the "project can bring added value to Ljubljana". It added that the construction site would have been active today if it was not for certain "arbitrary decisions".

The civil initiative that wants to keep the stadium in the original form as designed by Slovenia's greatest architect Plečnik (1872-1957) meanwhile criticised the decision of the Ljubljana city council.

It said that the "mayor and its voting machine in the city council has again preferred partial interests of a private investor to the public interest of the protection of cultural heritage and to the needs and wishes of citizens."

The initiative said it was "completely irrational" to support for 14 years "an illegal, unsustainable, environmentally unacceptable and obsolete project that would destroy a major work by Plečnik".

It argued that the BŠP project was not actually tied to the location of the Plečnik stadium, referring to the fact that in addition to renovation, it included a new multi-storage building housing a hotel, a sports clinic and department stores.

"If investors wanted to invest in the planned facilities, they could have built them in a suitable location a long time ago, at a significantly lower cost, without destroying a cultural monument of national importance," the initiative added.

It said that the project was "completely unnecessary and meaningless, as Ljubljana already has a modern football stadium, which is mostly empty, with taxpayers paying almost EUR 1 million euros a year to cover for its losses and maintenance".

The initiative believes that the state should buy off the cultural monument, restore it to the original form and return it to public use. If it is not possible to reach a buyout at a reasonable price, the state should initiate expropriation procedure.

Jure Leben, the former environment minister who took over the project in September 2019, told the STA that an appeal had been filed at the Administrative Court challenging the decision of the Environment Ministry from the end of March.

The ministry refused to issue a building permit to the BŠP for the project specifically in the area of the Plečnik stadium, explaining that the project did not comply with the cultural heritage protection regulations.

The Cultural Heritage Protection Institute issued a negative opinion in February, after originally issuing a positive opinion, which was annulled a few months later by the Culture Ministry under the current Minister Vasko Simoniti.

However, the relevant inspectorate has found several irregularities in the ministry's procedure, with Pečečnik saying at the time that the goal was for the Environment Ministry to establish that the annulment of the positive opinion was unlawful.

The procedure over the land adjacent to the existing apartment buildings that the Ljubljana municipality included in the project has been conducted at the Ljubljana Local Court since 2009.

The court is expected to decide whether the land is owned by the municipality or whether it is land associated to the buildings, as claimed by the residents, who oppose the development of the land around the buildings.