Avtal om kostnader för planarbete

Sammanfattning: Municipalities have large costs for their work with detailed development plans and area regulations. These planning costs are funded in different ways. Legislation permits municipalities to charge property owners for the planning costs of a certain plan, if the properties benefit from the plan by receiving building permits. Municipalities can charge a fee of planning when the building permits are processed. However, the fee can also be charged in advance. Many municipalities use this opportunity to form agreements with the property developers, in which they state terms for the division of work and payment of the plan. The aim of this master thesis has been to find out how municipalities can fund their planning costs according to current legislation, how they fund them today and how their practice with cost agreements relate to the legislation. To find what boundaries the current legislation gives, we have examined law, preceding bills and investigations as well as court decisions in the matter. By asking municipalities if and why they use agreements to regulate their planning costs, we got an idea of how common the procedure is. We also retrieved contracts from 54 different municipal archives, which we reviewed to find how they actually regulate the costs of planning. By interviewing both municipality representatives and property developers, we were given an even wider idea of what motivates the use of these agreements, how they state the terms and what problems they might cause. Our first conclusion is that the same rules apply for the municipalities’ funding of their planning costs, regardless if they charge them as a fee in connection to the building permits or if they regulate them in agreements in advance. It is always considered a fee of planning and the agreements must therefore follow the rules stated in the law. All costs related to necessary work with development plans and area regulations can be charged. The fee can however only be charged if the above-mentioned requirement of benefit is fulfilled. The price must follow the table of rates that the municipal politics have decided. The price must also be the same for equal cases and reflect the cost price. Furthermore, we have found that almost every municipality strive to use cost agreements in most planning cases. They find the practice of charging the fee in connection to building permits to be complicated and too little connected to the work with and the costs of the plan. We also conclude that some regulations that are commonly used in the cost agreements are not within the boundaries of the law. It occurs quite frequently that municipalities charge other prices than what their table of rates for planning costs states. This jeopardizes the credibility of the equality in the municipality’s way of funding. Another problem is that agreements in most cases regulates that the costs are going to be charged, even if the development plan would not gain legal power. A utilization of this kind of regulation would lead to property owners paying for planning costs that most definitely does not benefit their property.