New rules for building on Lake Zurich

Anyone who wants to build on the lake has to comply with a large number of regulations and laws. No large buildings are to be erected on the banks, and permeability and accessibility for the public are to be increased. This is what the Federal Spatial Planning Act wants, for example. Until recently, the canton of Zurich used thousands of concessions and permits issued towards the end of the 19th century to achieve such goals. They were awarded at the end of the 19th century.

Additions to the BZO necessary

95 percent of the shore of Lake Zurich consists of land that was filled in for roads and railroads. The canton granted concessions for these so-called land installations, which were subject to a wide variety of conditions. Although the land gradually passed into private ownership, the conditions remained – and served as leverage for the canton to protect the interests of the public. In 2013, the Federal Supreme Court rejected this; the special treatment of the concession land was a “special building regulation” without sufficient legal foundation, it said in a decision on a case from Rüschlikon.

The required legal basis is now being created with a new paragraph 67a in the cantonal planning and building law. The cantonal government has authorized the building department to submit the provision for consultation. Specifically, this means that the building and zoning regulations of the riverside municipalities must contain supplementary provisions on buildings, facilities and surrounding areas. The municipalities must therefore develop a set of rules similar to a core zone plan for the lakeshores. The creation of separate shore zones, which were still being discussed two years ago, is now being abandoned.

The new paragraph also sets out what is to be regulated, including building areas, the position and appearance of buildings, the length, width and height of buildings and structures and the treatment of the surrounding area. In a first step, recommendations for all these points were developed in cooperation with the riverside communities. The idea behind these recommendations is that only very cautious construction should take place on the banks in the future.

The new division of labor

The municipalities can therefore decide within a given framework how the riparian areas on their territory should develop. In future, they too – and no longer the canton – will decide on applications for buildings on concession land. For its part, the canton has the task of defining the watercourse area, i.e. the riparian zone in which only site-specific buildings in the public interest may be built. The Federal Water Protection Act stipulates a distance of 15 meters from the lake (in a transitional phase even 20 meters). Exceptions are possible in densely built-up areas.

Incidentally, the concessions have not quite played out despite everything. Although the structural restrictions are obsolete with the new legislation, other conditions remain in place, such as provisions on the passage of water, the maintenance of bank walls or the cession of land for public paths and roads. In addition, ownership of the land facilities is based on the concessions, which is why they must continue to exist for legal reasons alone.

The construction management has commissioned a legal opinion on the new specifications, which deals with such issues, among others. The central question put to the experts Tobias Jaag and Markus Rüssli was whether the public interests could still be safeguarded with the new provision in paragraph 67a. This question is answered in the affirmative: The public interests would definitely be safeguarded with the new paragraph, together with the requirements of the structure planning. Some of these public interests could also be safeguarded with the exceptional permits for buildings in the watercourse area.

The construction management also wanted to know whether the ancillary provisions in the concessions were still valid at all. The expert opinion also affirms this: The canton can still invoke the rights granted in the concessions. There was also a sufficient legal basis for these and they were “not extinguished either by the passage of time or by non-exercise”. The consultation on the new section of the PBG will last from May 12 to 11. August.

Adi Kälin, NZZ from 13.05.2017