In Republic of Srpska, 487,722 citizens have an address without a home number (or with b.b. codes), according to data from the Agency for Identification Documents, Records and Data Exchange of BiH (IDDEEA).
According to the population census, there are 1,170,342 inhabitants in the RS, which means that almost every second of them has address without home number. At the end of 2015 about 40% of RS citizens were registered at addresses without a home number.
The biggest problem with this is in Prijedor, where house number don’t have 45,161 citizens, in Doboj with 41,349 citizens and in Banja Luka with 34,157 citizens who have address without home number. These three cities together have 120,667 registered address without number.
They are followed by Laktaši with 27,560, Gradiška with 25,602, and Zvornik where addresses without number have 22,772 inhabitants.
In the village of Šušnjari, near Laktaši, there are no street names, which in particular pose problems for the locals.
“It often happens that unknown people knock on my door looking for a neighbor or my guests, who come for the first time, they lose a lot of time trying to find me,” said Susnjari’s villager.
He added that it is fortunate that the postman, who has been delivering mail to the neighborhood for a long time, knows their mail, and especially the bills or other important documents, do not wander and lose. It happens in some of their neighboring settlements, where they also do not have a street name.
Elvira Adžikić, spokesperson for the IDDEEA, said that there are 10,260 street names registered in the administrative and street registers, which were submitted by the competent authorities.
“In Prijedor hasn’t been established address register for 30 years, which is why in a large number of rural settlements there is no street system at all”, confirmed the Prijedor City Administration.
They added that since 2017 there is an address register and that they have just officially started recording the terrain.
“We do not have any data from the recorded scene, and most of all, because of that, we can not determine the house numbers. It is planned that the City Construction Institute is planning shoots scenes starting this spring, which will solve this problem,” said Prijedor City Administration.
This shortcoming is most pronounced in rural settlements in Prijedor, where previously they were assigned household numbers by settlements, and in the meantime new facilities were built, which should now be recorded in order to assign new numbers and in order to establish a street system.
Three years ago, the city of Doboj entered the phase of creating a register of streets and numbers, in which 27,000 numbers have been assigned so far.
“A large number of housing units were registered three years ago, and the main part of the work was done,” they said in the Doboj City Administration.
By mid-2019, all local communities in the RS should establish new up-to-date local address registries, and by that time, a central address register should be fully established and managed by the Republic Administration for Geodetic and Property Affairs (RUGIP). The central address register, as the sum of all address registries of local communities, once fully established, will be made available to the public at the RUGIP Geoportal.
“This registry gives local communities the ability to quickly and efficiently locate all addresses. In this way, there will no longer be an address with b.b.-codes, which, according to legal provisions, should not exist. This is why a new way of registering addresses is of huge importance for locating citizens and their property, their safety, the quality of their lives and the fulfillment of all citizens’ rights”, said Mariana Šarčević, a spokeswoman for RUGIP.
The new address register will facilitate the procedures for registering and checking out residence, mail delivery, emergency intervention, intervention of firefighters, social workers and others. It will be easier for the competent services to respond to emergency situations and situations of natural disasters, but also to perform various surveys, lists, social cards, and the like.
In the city of Banja Luka there will be no address with house signs b.b.(without number) thanks to the Agreement on the Establishment of a New Digitized Address Register for the City Area, signed in July last year between RUGIP and the City Administration of Banja Luka.
Address register
The establishment of new address registers in local communities in the Republic of Srpska and the central address register managed by RUGIP will be financed from donor funds from Sweden.
Thanks to these funds, local communities will not have any additional costs for setting up and maintaining address registries.
Local communities with the highest number of addresses without a home number are:
Prijedor – 45,161
Doboj – 41,349
Banja Luka – 34.157
Laktaši – 27,560
Gradiška – 25.602
Zvornik – 22,772
Prnjavor – 5.673
Bratunac – 4.053
Kozarska Dubica – 13,987
Kotor Varoš – 13.354
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Source: Voice of Srpska
