ANTT (National Land Transport Agency) published this Wednesday (4) an authorization that allows the necessary expropriation of properties for the construction of the Railway (EF-030), scheduled to connect Barra de São Francisco, on the coast of Espírito Santo Holy, a, no.
Authorization to start the process on the 1,188 km of route foreseen in the preliminary engineering project was given to Petrocity Ferrovias, a company created in 2013, formed by a group of executives from the logistics and banking sectors.
Petrocity Ferrovias is part of the list of companies that signed an adhesion contract in 2021, with the then Ministry of Infrastructure, to run the project privately, without the need for an auction and at the entrepreneur’s own risk.
For the project to move forward, however, not only the technical feasibility of the project must be proven, but also the environmental one, which in this case must be analyzed by Ibama, since the railway would cross two states. The request for prior licensing, which serves to certify the environmental viability and not to release the work, is still in progress within the federal environmental agency.
ANTT’s authorization already defines, based on previous studies, the area of real estate and the public utility polygonals for the passage of the tracks.
“At the moment, the start of works depends on the progress of environmental licensing”, said José Roberto Barbosa da Silva, executive director of Petrocity Ferrovias. “Since 2022, we have been following the schedule and ensuring effective compliance with the current law. With the delimited areas, we can continue with the administrative expropriation work. We no longer just have railway projects, we have railway projects underway for implementation.”
According to Wesley Bento, a lawyer specializing in Administrative Law and partner at the firm Bento Muniz Advocacia, responsible for the regulatory structuring of the project, the ANTT act confirms the viability of railway authorizations, instead of traditional auctions, in which the government defines where and how railway must be built.
“This demonstrates the vitality of these authorized railways and that it is worth believing in the model, when well managed. Projects of this nature continue to have the potential to transform the profile of freight transport in the country”, he said.
The Railway Authorization Program was established by Provisional Measure in August 2021. In December of that year, a new regulatory framework for the sector was established, with the new Railway Law, providing for a grant under a private law regime, passing responsibility for formalization and management of membership contracts for ANTT.
Today, the agency has 46 current authorization contracts, but none of them have reached the environmental installation license stage, which allows the works to begin. Of the 46 requests, 26 are in the initial analysis phase and another 19 have not even entered this stage.
The Ministry of Transport, under the command of the minister (-AL), has criticized the so-called “paper railways”, which have not yet effectively materialized, since the approval of the new railway landmark, in December 2021. The current government is also preparing , a package of new measures that will change this legal framework.
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