Kazakh parliament passes amendments on seismic safety to Construction Code
ASTANA. Dec 29 (Interfax) - The Majilis, the lower house of the Kazakh parliament, at a plenary meeting on Monday, approved amendments on the Construction Code proposed by the Senate.
The Code is now considered approved by the parliament on the whole and is to be forwarded to the president to be signed into law.
The Majilis's Committee on Economic Reform and Regional Development concluded earlier that the amendments proposed by the Senate were clarifying in nature and did not change the Code's conceptual provisions. The Senate adjusted the competencies of local representative and executive bodies and the wordings of the articles regarding the development and approval of project documentation.
The Majilis also approved the Senate's amendments to a related law amending regulations concerning digitalization, transport, and entrepreneurship, which also were clarifying in nature and did not alter the conceptual provisions adopted by the Majilis.
As reported previously, the Kazakh Construction Code is designed to establish a legal system regulating architectural, urban planning, and construction activities, to create a safe living environment for people, to develop urban planning for populated areas, and to provide barrier-free access to social infrastructure for all categories of the population.
The Code's key innovations stipulate that adjustments to a detailed planning project for a populated area can be made no more often than once every two years, that seismic microzoning maps must be used at all stages of construction project design, that construction projects must be certified for seismic risk assessment, that digitalization must be implemented in the construction industry in the form of a unified construction portal, and that the implementation of urban development projects must be monitored through an automated digital system of the state urban development cadaster.
A related law introduces a new renovation mechanism to protect the rights of residents of dilapidated and hazardous housing by providing guarantees from a single housing construction operator under a co-funded housing construction contract.
The new legislation also prohibits the provision of land plots to individuals and legal entities for private ownership and temporary land use for construction purposes in seismic zones without reference to seismic microzoning maps and maps of mudslide- and landslide-prone areas.
In addition, the document lifts the ban on the transportation of goods using dump trucks whose maximum weight exceeds the vehicle's established permissible total weight on public roads and streets in populated areas.
