Talks between Prague and the prime minister over the construction of a government quarter have hit a wall over an ambitious set of demands from the capital city. Prague’s mayor Zdeněk Hrib says that city land needed for the project could potentially be given to the state, but he asked in return for CZK 60bn to complete the Prague ring road as well as an army barracks in Prague 8, where he’d like to move City Hall to. The mayor also asked the state to throw the Na Bulovce hospital into the mix so that new housing could be built on the land. Prime minister Andrej Babiš has since written the mayor to say that the deal is a non-starter. “It exceeds the value of the land that the state expressed interest in in Letňany,” wrote Babiš, according to the Prague daily (Denik). The paper writes that the state’s estimate of the value of the land is just CZK 401m, while the price for the Prague 8 barracks alone was CZK 620m in 2014. The prime minister said he’s willing to continue in negotiations, but that if it can’t find land to build on, the state will have to buy buildings from the private sector and sell off assets (including the Prague 8 barracks and its hospital Na Bulovce).
