The fact that individual shopping centers belonging to the same commercial zone are not submitted to a comprehensive EIA procedure is not automatically a case of prohibited salami-slicing, says the Supreme Administrative Court.
The colloquial term “salami-slicing” or “salami tactics” is used to describe a practice whereby someone breaks up a controversial or scarcely attainable goal, and the path that leads there, into smaller steps that are then taken one by one. In civil engineering, one encounters this tactic not only where the routes for major traffic infrastructure are being designed or approved, but also in the case of surreptitious expansions of previously approved and completed buildings. From the point of view of the Czech EIA Act (Act No. 100/2001 Coll.), whose basic principles include the requirement that building projects are always subjected to a comprehensive assessment as to their impact on the environment, salami-slicing is a prohibited practice, as it serves to circumvent the law for ulterior motives.
Where urban commercial or industrial zones are being gradually expanded, the question often arises whether the developers are not pursuing self-serving salami tactics. The answers given by administrative practice have previously been inconsistent. For this reason, developers and legal advisors welcomed the ruling by the Supreme Administrative Court of 23 December 2022 (case file No. 2 As 86/2020-134), according to which it is not prohibited salami-slicing if individual shopping centers which form part of a single commercial zone (but do not exceed the set thresholds) are not assessed by way of EIA – because the ulterior motive of ostensibly splitting up a single development project into smaller projects so as to circumvent the law is absent.
It may be true that the cohesive development of shopping malls and department stores results in a single commercial zone; however, the Supreme Administrative Court has found that the EIA Act does not automatically condition the creation of such a zone with an environmental impact assessment, given that the subject matter of the EIA Act are individual buildings (i.e., the individual shopping center) as opposed to the conglomerations which gradually arise from them. Therefore, one must weigh in each individual case whether the functional or structural links between individual buildings in a given commercial zone are of such intensity as to allow for the unambiguous conclusion that these buildings in fact represent one single development project (whose environmental impact would then have to be assessed in its entirety).
In conclusion, one may say that the comprehensive assessment of the environmental impact of commercial or industrial zones falls within the purview of what is known as the SEA (Strategic Environmental Assessment) – a process which takes place much earlier, during the completion of documents for zoning and land-use planning, as part of finding a comprehensive conceptual solution for the circumstances at the target site. The SEA serves to assess the synergic and cumulative effects of the building project (including any pre-existing environmental impact).