Acquire permit before building— Ga West MCE
The Municipal Chief Executive of the Ga-West Municipal Assembly, Mr Samuel Attuquaye Quaye, has urged developers in the municipality to acquire the needed permits for their property before embarking on any construction work.
He said the indiscriminate building of houses without permit posed a serious problem for the assembly.
Speaking at a press briefing in Accra yesterday, Mr Quaye said the local government law stated that, “no physical development shall be carried out in a district without prior approval in the form of written permit granted by the District Planning Committee.”
He observed however that in the last five years a large number of buildings in the municipality had no permit.
Mr Quaye attributed the irregularity to ignorance on the part of residents. He said most of them did not know how building permits were acquired and why they needed them.
He said there were two types of permits that residents needed before embarking on their projects.He mentioned them as resident and commercial permits.
He said the assembly had resolved to simplify the processes for acquiring permits in order to create opportunity for people who had put up houses without permits to legalise their transaction.
Requirements
To acquire a building permit in the Ga-West Municipality, Mr Quaye said one had to present documents confirming ownership of land, four sets of architectural drawings and results of soil tests to the District Planning Committee.
He said the assembly had observed defects in public and commercial buildings in the municipality.
The defects, he said, if not checked could lead to the collapse of the buildings which may kill and injure people.
He said to avoid any such misfortune from happening, the assembly would , from January 1, 2015, make it mandatory for developers to use professional architects and engineers in the construction of public and commercial buildings.
Client Service Centre
He said a client service centre had been established in the Physical Planning Department of the assembly to facilitate the easy processing of building permits.
He explained that the department was the only designated place where all applications would be received and attended to.
“With this, any application that did not go through the client service centre would be rejected,” he said.
Revenue mobilisation
Mr Quaye said the assembly would embark on a property rate collection exercise to retrieve monies owed the assembly by property owners.
According to him, the measure was part of a drive to mobilise revenue in the municipality to enable the assembly to complete its planned development projects.
After the press conference, Mr Quaye presented a Toyota Hulix pickup vehicle to the municipality’s special task force on revenue to facilitate its mobilisation drive.
