Locals in South Bohemia fear private developers are trying to strong-arm them into hosting a massive new warehouse of US retail and tech giant Amazon.
“Some people call me naïve, but I believe we have to fight for the areas we live in,” says Eva Horakova in a phone interview with BIRN.
A microbiologist at the Czech Academy of Sciences, Horakova has lived in Borsov nad Vltavou, a small town of about 2,000 inhabitants just south-west of Ceske Budejovice, in southern Bohemia, for more than 15 years.
When she started noticing factual discrepancies and contradictory statements over what private developers were planning for one of her city’s logistics and industrial parks, she felt she had to do something about it and went on to found the Hlas Borsova (“Voice of Borsov”) citizens’ initiative with other neighbours and locals.
According to Horakova, who is also running as the Christian Democratic KDU-CSL party’s lead in the upcoming October municipal elections: “Many people here are scared. They think that if we don’t accept Amazon, we’ll end up in a worse situation.”
Amazon eyes Czech expansion
Last year, US online retail giant Amazon celebrated 10 years of presence in the Czech Republic since the opening of its first logistics centre in Dobroviz, just west of Prague’s International Airport. This project was followed in 2023 by the launch of a robotics logistics centre in Kojetin, in the region of Morad claims it has invested 45 billion Czech crowns (around 1.7 billion euros) in the country over the past decade
“We are proud that Amazon is helping not only the business grown in the Czech Republic, but also the communities in which it operates,” Slawomir Plonka, Amazon’s regional director for Central and Eastern Europe, said at the time of the 10-year anniversary.
It hasn’t, however, all been plain sailing. In Dobroviz, local opposition to the arrival of Bezos’s 95,000-square-metre mega-warehouse sparked significant media and political attention, delaying its opening by several months and forcing Amazon to miss out on the 2014 Christmas season.
The construction finally went ahead after the developer Panattoni Europe signed two separate cooperation agreements with both the municipality and a local civic association, binding them to an annual contribution of 1 million crowns and to invest in several local infrastructure upgrades, like the modernisation of the municipal wastewater treatment plant, noise barriers and the construction of a bypass.
Meanwhile, Amazon was forced to withdraw plans to open its second distribution centre in Brno, Czechia’s second-largest city, after local opposition and repeated delays.
Eva Horakova fears that what happened in Dobroviz more than ten years ago, when Amazon managed to override local grievances and concerns about the warehouse’s local impact, is about to repeat itself in Borsov nad Vltavou.
“The pressure is insane. Developers are doing their maximum to have it signed before the October local elections,” she tells BIRN.
August deadline
Now being developed by investors Accolade and Garbe, the land of the Borsov Economic Development Zone I was purchased in 1998, with initial zoning plans banking on the construction of a large shopping centre.
This never materialised, and in 2020 developers received zoning approval for the construction of four smaller, separate industrial halls – two of which already have building permits – for a total built area of over 148,000 square metres. Now, the modalities have changed again.
Accolade and Garbe redesigned the entire project into a single, larger building (77,000 square metres in size, about 500 metres long and 15 metres high) specifically for a single tenant – Amazon – on an expected 20-year-lease agreement. About 2,500 people could be employed there, working on a two-shift rotation running almost non-stop from 06:30 to 04:30.
According to Borsov nad Vltavou’s mayor, Romana Rycova, the municipality was only informed about the change at the end of April. And in a video posted on August 13, Mayor Rycova stated that the municipal council must now approve the new variant by the end of August or the investors will redesign the project so they can bypass the municipality’s approval – despite an earlier promise made to residents to “wait as long as you need”.
Representatives for the investors tell BIRN that their earlier communication might have been misconstrued. “When we said that there would be no time pressure, we meant that we would not push municipal council members towards a particular decision or influence how they vote,” says Tomas Mile, project manager at Accolade.
“It did not mean that the project itself had no commercial timetable,” he says, adding that the municipality had been informed since late 2025 about the changes. Rather than a sudden change, Mile describes the new single-building option as “the gradual development of a new option in response to a specific requirement from a prospective tenant”.
Furthermore, he says that while “we understand the concerns raised by residents”, he makes the case that developers have shown goodwill and transparency over the past several months to explain the differences and varying impacts to local residents.
Amazon did not respond to BIRN’s requests for comment.
However, Horakova says she has attended all the public meetings held over the past several months and describes the communication there from developers as “misleading at best”.
Considering the new parameters of the project, she also believes that fresh independent studies should be conducted to upgrade now-outdated environmental impact studies and properly evaluate the impact of such a massive distribution centre on traffic, air-quality, noise pollution and local landscape preservation – just a few of the main concerns expressed by both residents and city officials over the past several months.
“We’ve found no evidence that these studies have been updated for the new design, including in the investor’s own newest technical documentation,” Horakova explains.
Echoing the thoughts of other locals, Horakova accuses the developers of “not being a trustworthy party”. Case in point, Veronika Zacha – who became Garbe’s senior manager for business development for Czechia after moving from Panattoni in 2022 – promised during an August town hall meeting: “We don’t want to pressure the municipality, we also understand that you need to familiarise yourself with all the information, so you have time.”
Yet shortly afterwards, city councillors received an SMS clarifying that developers expect a decision by the end of the month – or else they will move ahead with the four-hall format, according to information from iRozhlas.cz and other local outlets.
More at stake?
Representatives for Accolade and Garbe have repeatedly made the case that their planned single hall has a smaller built-up area and lower traffic intensity, is more environmentally friendly than four separate buildings, and that having one single tenant – especially “a good partner” like Amazon – provides stronger guarantees and more stability for the municipality.
They also highlight the benefits of the property tax of about 10 million crowns that they would pay out to the municipality annually.
But behind closed doors, there are strong suspicions of foul play and a nagging feeling that the four-building variant was never seriously considered as an option, but is instead being used as a foil to frame the new single-hall design as an obvious improvement and hand over the keys to Amazon – all through local impact studies and building permits for a project that was never meant to be built in the first place.
“If true, that would undercut the credibility of the deadline pressure itself,” surmises Horakova.
Tomas Mile for Accolade insists that “the four-building scheme is not a theoretical alternative, but an already permitted development scenario whose key impacts, including traffic, were assessed as part of the relevant permitting process.”
But the pressure is there, and it is unclear how things will go at the August 31 municipal council meeting, with Horakova assessing that the nine-member municipal council is evenly divided on the issue. The situation is “very shaky”, she says. “Anything could happen.”
“The municipal council is faced with a decision on whether to approve the project with the benefits, or not to approve it and take into account the consequences of that,” summarised Borsov nad Vltavou Mayor Romana Rycova.
Accolade’s Mile says negotiations are still ongoing “to conclude a planning agreement with the municipality which, alongside the conditions of the project, could also include specific contributions, investments or other measures benefiting Borsov nad Vltavou”, which he states is their “preferred option”.
“At the same time, there is an alternative version of the project that would not require the municipality’s involvement, and the municipal leadership was informed about this possibility in advance,” he says.
The underreported battle in this small South Bohemian town points to larger questions about Amazon’s presence in Czechia – a country it moved into after a series of strikes hit its German logistics centres in 2013, attracted by cheaper labour and a prime geographical location. To this day, Amazon doesn’t have a Czech website, with domestic consumers having to go through its German website, and the US giant’s local distribution and logistics centres are mainly used as hubs to serve its German or Austrian markets.
“Companies like Amazon are not interested in protracting the construction process, as they need to build their centres as fast as possible,” says Miroslav Pazdera, an architect and co-author of Steel Cities: Logistics Architecture in Central and Eastern Europe”. He also highlights local governments’ weak negotiating position in such dealings with powerful actors like Amazon, who have the luxury of shopping around for willing communities.
“There was a sole requirement for the construction of the Amazon distribution centre in the Czech Republic: a maximum distance of 300 kilometres from the German border and the shortest possible connection to the highway network,” he explains. “Amazon could not care less if its new warehouse would stand near Prague, Brno or perhaps Pardubice.”
Source: balkaninsight.com
