Nghe An National Assembly Delegate: Clarifying the plan for allocating funds for land acquisition and clearance for Long Thanh airport

(Baonghean.vn) - The National Assembly delegation of Nghe An province agreed on the plan to separate the compensation, support and resettlement contents into component projects to implement the Long Thanh International Airport Project. However, the delegates are concerned about the capital source to balance enough 23,000 billion VND to implement this project.

Overview of the group discussion session. Photo: Thanh Loan

The Long Thanh International Airport project was approved by the 13th National Assembly in Resolution No. 94 for investment. It is expected that more than 5,614 hectares will be reclaimed for the project, 614.65 hectares more than the area approved by the 13th National Assembly, including 5,000 hectares of land for airport construction, the rest is land for resettlement areas and cemeteries.

The total estimated budget for implementing the compensation, support and resettlement project is about 23,000 billion VND. Discussing in the group, delegate Nguyen Dac Vinh - Member of the Party Central Committee, Secretary of the Provincial Party Committee, Head of the National Assembly Delegation of Nghe An agreed with the plan to separate the compensation, support and resettlement content into a component project to implement the Long Thanh International Airport Project.

However, delegate Nguyen Dac Vinh assessed that this component project has a very large area to recover and a large source of funding to implement. Therefore, when implementing it, “it is necessary to calculate carefully” to ensure effectiveness.

Delegate Nguyen Van Chi - Standing Member of the National Assembly's Finance and Budget Committee (Nghe An delegation) also completely agreed with the proposal at this session, the National Assembly approved in principle the separation of component projects to implement the recovery, compensation, and resettlement support. After that, the Government will have a feasibility report for this component project to submit to the National Assembly at the 4th session.

However, delegate Nguyen Van Chi emphasized: "In the feasibility report of this component project, there are issues that need to be further clarified to ensure that the recovery, compensation, and resettlement support plan is implemented effectively and on time."

According to Ms. Van Chi, it is necessary to clarify the capital allocation plan because as planned now, only 5,000 billion VND/23,000 billion VND has been allocated; at the same time, there must be a plan to exploit and use the recovered land effectively to avoid losing opportunity costs of using the recovered land when the project has not yet been implemented.

Where the capital for the component project, which is still lacking about 18,000 billion VND, will be mobilized from is also an issue raised by Deputy Head of the National Assembly Delegation of Nghe An Province Nguyen Thanh Hien.

“Regarding capital, if the site clearance is complete, it is estimated that 23,000 billion VND will be needed, but the medium-term capital will only balance 5,000 billion VND by 2020. The capital sources being considered are auctioning land use rights, collecting land use rights, and collecting short-term land rent. I think this is an extremely difficult problem,” said delegate Thanh Hien.

Perspective of Long Thanh Airport. Photo from internet

Although the National Assembly approved the investment policy for the Long Thanh airport project 2 years ago, the implementation is considered slow. Therefore, in addition to highly agreeing with the policy of separating the project into components, Colonel Nguyen Huu Cau - Director of Nghe An Provincial Police Department asked the question: "Is the Government's determination to ensure that the project will be implemented synchronously when the National Assembly approves it?" because the project implementation time is very long.

“I want to ask this so that we can feel secure when voters ask about the Government’s determination, because the project has been implemented a bit slowly over the past two years,” said delegate Nguyen Huu Cau.

Delegate of Lai Chau Phung Quoc Hien - Member of the Party Central Committee, Vice Chairman of the National Assembly stated that site clearance work must be completed thoroughly to have a clean and favorable site for the project.

However, regarding the lack of funding of about 18,000 billion VND for the component project, the Vice Chairman of the National Assembly said that the Government has proposed a plan to take from the source of land use rights auction for service activities about more than 1,000 hectares and deduct land use fees when allocating resettlement land.

The National Assembly Economic Committee also suggested an additional option: if after deducting those sources there is still a shortage, then use the reserve source of medium-term public investment capital until 2020.

“We also support the Government to speed up the project progress. The policy is there, the important thing is to organize the implementation properly and bring about the highest efficiency,” said Mr. Phung Quoc Hien.

Reporter - Contributor Group