From now on, July 7 will be an important date for the Pomeranian amber community. It was on this day at the Amber Museum that Mayor of Gdansk Pawel Adamowicz ceremoniously signed a directive regulating the lease of city-owned land in Gdansk for amber prospecting.
This is the first directive in 35 years to deal with the lease of city-owned land for amber prospecting. Fourteen prospecting licences were granted in 1972, each of the seven then-operating organisations which dealt with amber working received two licences for extraction. Gdansk amber jewellers recall that time as a golden age for the community. Legal amber extraction ceased in 1989. Since then, in spite of enormous deposits of the Gold of the Baltic, Pomeranian amber jewellers rely mainly on raw amber imported from the Kaliningrad Oblast, the Ukraine and on illegally mined amber.
The Mayor’s directive determines the rules and procedures for the lease of land owned by the Municipality of the City of Gdansk for purposes related to the prospecting, identifying and extraction of amber deposits. The leaseholders will be selected by unrestricted tender procedure. The tender’s preferred criterion is the price bid for the lease of the plot, with the starting price of PLN 1,000 per hectare, payable monthly for 12 months. After the lapse of the agreement for the deposit prospecting and identification, the leaseholder will be obliged to tidy up and rehabilitate the research site. Should the prospecting lead to the discovery of amber deposits, the Mayor will put forward a motion to the City Council to change the spatial management plans to enable further extraction. The leaseholder who carried out the deposit prospecting has priority rights for signing the agreement for the eventual extraction.
We can expect the first tenders as soon as in September, when the first plots between the Gdansk districts of Przerobka and Stogi will be leased (30 hectares of land). The selection of this real estate was consulted with the amber community, however, Mayor Adamowicz has not closed the list of land for lease, and indeed is waiting for more possible locations for prospecting to be indicated. In answer to a question by Zbigniew Strzelczyk about land owned by the State Treasury, the Mayor replied that he will soon turn to the Pomeranian Governor [Voivod] for authorisation to lease land located outside the Municipality of Gdansk on behalf of the State Treasury. The Mayor also wants to press the Port of Gdansk Authority S.A. to allow the prospecting for amber deposits in the wasteland within the port area.
The work on the directive took over a dozen months and is a pioneering step forward. No one had ever developed such a document in Poland before. The directive is in full compliance with the current mining laws and regulations. Therefore, in order to facilitate the introduction of similar regulations elsewhere, Gdansk makes its know-how available to other municipalities and lets them copy its document.
The signing ceremony at the Court Hall of the Amber Museum was attended by members of the amber community, including: Wieslaw Gierlowski (World Amber Council), Mariusz Gliwinski (International Amber Association), Wojciech Kalandyk (Amber Altar Foundation), Karol Kowalski (Association of Polish Crafts), Zbigniew Strzelczyk (Polish Commercial Chamber of Amber) and Adam Pstragowski (S&A Amber Jewellery), as well as journalists from trade publications and the local press.
Karol Kowalski and Adam Pstr�gowski gave Mayor Pawel Adamowicz a cup made of 500 g of amber for his courage in taking key decisions for the amber industry. The Mayor commented on the cup saying that courage is indeed the most important thing in combating bureaucracy, which is wary of all things new.
Robert Pytlos, the Amber Affairs Co-ordinator, added that work is underway on the amendment of the Mine Law, which would include provisions for two commodity exchanges, i.e. a mineral exchange in Wroclaw and an amber exchange in Gdansk. This is very valuable news as it will help to stabilise the prices of raw amber and facilitate its legal sale. This will also form a basis for the introduction of a system of raw amber classification and the determining of its origin.
