On Friday, 26 June, the Ungheni Municipal Council met in session, and the City Hall published the full recording — almost an hour of debate, streamed on the institution’s page. In the text accompanying the footage, Mayor Vitalie Vrabie slipped in a credo about how the town should grow.
there is no rush to build something on every vacant lot Vitalie Vrabie, mayor of Ungheni
A clear delimitation between residential, commercial and recreational zones is „certainly necessary”, the mayor writes, and „open, well-planned spaces bring more value to a city” than one more building.
The message does not float in the abstract. In these very weeks, the municipality wrapped up public consultations on two documents that address exactly the subject the mayor raised — what and how gets built on individual plots in central Ungheni. They are two Zonal Urban Plans (PUZ): one for the plot at Romană 35, the other for a group of six parcels at Alexandru cel Bun 30.
What a PUZ is and why it concerns you
A Zonal Urban Plan is no archival formality. It is the document that, for a delimited area of the town, rewrites the rules of the game — what use a plot has (housing, commerce, services, green space), how tall and how dense one may build, where roads and utilities run. In practice, a PUZ amends the General Urban Plan (PUG), the town’s baseline map, at the level of a „territorial reference unit” (UTR) — a slice of the urban fabric.
That is where the stakes lie. The general plan says how the town should look as a whole; a PUZ adjusts that vision for a specific plot, usually at the request of an owner or an investor who wants to put up something the general plan does not yet permit. That is why the law — the new Urban Planning and Construction Code (no. 434/2023) — requires the administration to put the project to public consultation before approving it: so that people in the area get to say whether or not they want that change next to their home.
The two plans on Ungheni’s table
For the plot at Romană 35 (cadastral no. 9201104.830), the City Hall organised the public consultation from 2 to 17 June, under the mayor’s order of 28 May. The document — PUZ no. 2025/03/09, drawn up by the design firm SRL „CAZACU” — amends the general plan at the level of UTR no. 11 and implements an earlier council decision, of 7 May 2025. The written and graphic materials, four albums of memoranda and drawings, were published on the City Hall’s website, and the consultation minutes were to be signed between 18 and 20 June.
The second, larger one, covers six parcels at Alexandru cel Bun 30 (cadastral nos. 9201103.758, 902, 903, 904, 905 and 722). Here the consultation came earlier, from 26 May to 10 June, under the order of 26 May. This PUZ (no. 10/25, drawn up by SRL „TARCHITECTS GROUP”) amends the general plan at the level of UTR no. 10 and implements a council decision of 20 December 2024. The document set also included an associated regulation — the part that actually fixes what may and may not be built on those plots.
Both procedures bear the same signature, that of Mayor Vitalie Vrabie, and were entrusted to deputy mayor Nicolae Cevaga and to the municipality’s chief architect, Vlad Savin, designated responsible for presenting the projects and collecting proposals. The aim stated in both orders is identical and sounds almost like the Facebook message — „maintaining a favourable habitat in the respective zone”.
Why the word „delimitation” carries weight
This is the tension worth seeing for any Ungheni resident. On one hand, the mayor promises restraint — we don’t build on every free scrap, we keep open spaces. On the other, the very instrument in the works, the PUZ, is precisely the mechanism through which the town adjusts its general plan to allow construction on specific plots. The two do not necessarily contradict each other — a PUZ can just as well limit what goes up on a plot as it can clear the way for a building. The difference is made by the regulation’s provisions, that is, the very documentation put out for consultation.
There is one more detail. The fact that both plans were drawn by private design firms is nothing unusual — that is how PUZs are produced everywhere. But it reinforces a simple rule for the citizen: whoever wants to know what is changing next to them should read the regulation, not the title of the decision. And the public consultation, those two windows of about two weeks each, is the only moment when residents’ opinion officially enters the file.
In the background: a town that, in parallel, sells and develops
The zoning debate is not theoretical in Ungheni. At the previous session, on 15 May, the council took, on the same day, several land decisions — it changed the designation of some public plots, approved the separation and sale of a plot adjacent to a building, and initiated the delimitation of other properties. At the same time, the town invests in open public space — exactly the „well-planned” kind the mayor invokes: it funded the first stage of the Delia lake waterfront development and is carrying on the regeneration of the French Park, where on about four hectares sports grounds, tracks and playgrounds are appearing.
In other words, Ungheni is doing in parallel both things that any urban policy entails — releasing land for construction and laying out space for recreation. That is precisely why the „clear delimitation between zones” the mayor invokes is not empty talk, but the concrete test by which it will be seen whether the promise keeps pace with the decisions.
Next, the council’s vote
The consultations for the two PUZs are over. The next step is the council’s vote on the documents, after which the plans become binding for the plots concerned. The decisions, once adopted, are published in the State Register of Local Acts, and the urban-planning documentation — the memoranda, the drawings and the regulation — remains at the City Hall, with the chief architect. Anyone living on Romană or on Alexandru cel Bun who wants to know what will go up nearby has the right to request the consultation minutes and the approved regulation.