Brno city council intends to buy the building of the former Czech Post (‘Česká pošta’) headquarters on Orli in the centre of Brno, as approved in the council meeting on April 30.
The building is intended to become a centralised location to substitute and serve the purpose of the municipal authorities’ buildings in the city districts, in order to ensure a uniform interpretation of the city’s urban plan, and consolidate roles to ensure the proper staffing of construction authorities, which has been a problem with offices in individual districts.
“Since the decision to establish a new central building office, we have been working intensively to ensure that it can start operations at Orlí 30 from the beginning of July,” said Jiří Oliva, Brno city councillor for property. He said Czech Post had given the green light to the direct sale of three of its administrative buildings (Orlí 30, Orlí 32, and Benešova 8) to the City of Brno for a price of CZK 215,180,000, as determined by an expert opinion.
Oliva explained the benefits of this operation: “It would be great for the city if it managed to buy buildings in the immediate vicinity of the current municipality building, where the city could place not only a centralised construction office, but also some other officials who still have to use commercially rented premises. This would of course save on future rents. A significant bonus for the city’s citizens is the operation of postal services by the City of Brno at Orlí, in the form of Pošta Partner. In one building, people will be able to handle both official and postal matters.”
Pošta Partner was established by Czech Post to provide post services through private contractors. The agreement between the City of Brno and Czech Post to host one of these facilities in the building was made last February, when the purchase of the building by the City Council already seemed likely.
“Czech Posts had no further operational use for the buildings in the centre of Brno,” said Martina Ivanová, the director of the Czech Posts branch network. “It is important for us that Pošta Partner operates here, increasing the comfort for customers, as it increases the possibilities of where to handle their postal matters. The operator of Pošta Partner is the city, therefore nothing prevented the sale of the buildings to it.”
Transfer of the building should take place by the end of July; until then it will be rented by the City Council for an agreed CZK 1,429,642 a month. The new Department of Urban Planning and Building Regulations, which will subsequently move into the office, will start operating on 1 July.
In the meanwhile the premises intended for the new department are being modified. Workers are carrying out the painting and replacement of floor coverings, while IT technicians have started the implementation of data distributions.
The necessary work, including repairs, the furnishing of offices, and the purchase of reference vehicles, will cost another several million crowns, with the total amount to be reported at the end of the operations.
The monumental functionalist building on Orli was built for the police headquarters in 1927, according to the project of architects Jaroslav Grunt and Josef Adolf Šálk. It was occupied by the German police after the occupation in March 1939 – the Gestapo was also based here for a while. In 1944, the building was hit during bombing of the city. The following year, after the repairs, the communist Directorate of National Security was established on the premises. It became a post office in recent decades, after the Velvet Revolution.
