Jana Korytárová

This paper focuses on the application of risk management as a qualitative criterion for evaluating public construction contracts using the Best Value Approach (BVA). This method is being progressively implemented in the Czech Republic as a strategic tool to enhance the quality and efficiency of public procurement. The primary objective is to present the “Risk Assessment Plan” criterion and its role in improving project preparation. The analysis is based on practical experience gained from construction contracts executed by a specific public institution. The study examines the principles, parameters, and evaluation process of the “Risk Assessment Plan” criterion, assessing its functionality and effectiveness within the real-world context of the Czech public procurement environment. The criterion proved to be an effective tool, providing the contracting authority with direct insight into bidders’ capabilities to identify, describe, and manage project risks. Key findings include verification of the professional readiness and expertise of suppliers, effective transfer of market knowledge and experience into the project preparation process, a significant increase in the project’s readiness for the implementation phase and enhanced transparency and objectivity in the bid evaluation process. The article also highlights critical pitfalls and common mistakes made by both bidders and contracting authorities –notably the confusion between project-specific risks and general supplier risks, insufficient documentation structure, and a fundamental misunderstanding of the criterion’s purpose. Based on these observations, the paper provides methodological recommendations for the correct definition of the criterion, scoring mechanisms, and its subsequent use during project execution. The results confirm that a well‐structured risk management criterion is essential for more effective project delivery and overall higher standards in public construction works.

Tornadoes represent a significant natural hazard to critical infrastructure worldwide, as they can cause sudden and severe damage with far-reaching societal consequences. In this study, the authors investigate the vulnerability and resilience of public and critical infrastructure buildings in the Czech Republic to tornado impacts, with a particular focus on the 2021 South Moravian tornado. The research identifies key structural weaknesses, damage patterns, and protective factors through a detailed field survey of 46 tornado-affected buildings. The results highlight that building size, construction quality, material durability, and maintenance significantly influence tornado resistance. Buildings of reinforced concrete and steel frames showed higher resistance, while older, inadequately maintained masonry and timber buildings were highly susceptible to collapse. The conclusions recommend regular maintenance of building, structural reinforcement, installation of protection elements and robust roof system of public buildings. These insights provide a practical foundation for strengthening disaster preparedness policies at regional or national levels.

A large number of state-owned companies were privatized in the Czech Republic after the end of the communist regime, mostly through their transformation into joint-stock companies. The water management sector was no exception from this process. The ownership of infrastructure networks was transferred to individual municipalities, which are legally obliged to provide their inhabitants with water supply and sewerage disposal. Subsequently, the municipalities joined together in joint-stock companies to enhance their capacity to provide sufficient financial resources for the rehabilitation and development of water infrastructure and also to enable the implementation of sustainable water management strategies, which are key to environmental protection. Assets contributed to joint-stock companies in the form of non-monetary contributions serve as a basis for a proportionate allocation of shares, representing the shareholder’s share of participation in the company’s management. An analysis of the asset performance within these companies indicates the necessity of developing an optimized methodology for determining the number of shares allocated for such non-monetary contributions. This need arises from significant disparities in both profitability and cost-efficiency among municipalities, depending on factors such as population size (revenues) and the length and technical characteristics of the infrastructure networks (costs) contributed to the joint-stock companies. The authors of the article present the research project results, aimed at developing a methodological procedure for determining the price (value) of municipal infrastructure assets contributed as non-monetary capital to a joint-stock company that owns and operates water management networks, from which the secondary objective of determining the fair value of a municipality’s water management infrastructure assets based on the developed methodology is derived. The proposed methodological procedure is primarily based on establishing the ratio between the fixed and variable costs of the municipality.

Acquired long-term tangible assets of water management companies generate depreciation costs during operation. The cost item naturally reduces the profit/loss and income tax deduction and, at the same time, creates financial space for the future restoration of this property, reinvestment by being able to include it in the unit price of water and/or sewerage charge rates if certain rules are met. On the basis of these legislative rules, it follows that property financed by subsidies cannot be depreciated in this way, i.e., cannot generate funds for future reinvestment. The contribution aims to present a methodical procedure for deciding on a strategy for the development of the profit/loss of enterprises when “predicted” (modeled) depreciation of fixed assets acquired from subsidies is included in the model, with a focus on the indicator of financial performance—profitability of sales. Basic methods and selected indicators from ratio indicator methods used in financial analysis were used in the methodical procedure. The methodological procedure, which was developed on the basis of a case study as part of a research report for a selected water management enterprise, was further implemented and verified on a sample of water management enterprises, which have almost a 50% share in the value of all assets in the form of infrastructure assets in the Czech Republic. The output of the article is the fact that when “predicted” (modeled) depreciation is included in the profit/loss, the profitability of sales decreases. The study shows that there is up to a 15% change in the profitability of sales. The contribution of the article is a proven methodological procedure that takes into account the generation of profit/loss with regard to the necessary reinvestment of assets acquired with subsidies. This strategy can generally be used by all companies that acquire assets from public subsidy sources.

This contribution is focused on the issue of the application of energy-saving measures in the construction of new residential properties and their optimal combinations with regard to the life-cycle costs of these buildings. The aim of the research is to create a methodological basis for considering the economic and financial impacts of various combinations of energy-saving measures, aiming at the optimization of these measures and the sustainability of developer projects. The research methodology is based on the principle of building life-cycle costs, which serve as a key criterion for the process of choosing the optimal combination of energy-saving measures and for comparing a conventional solution with an innovative solution including the application of energy-saving measures. The result of the research is the methodological approach for the design of technologically proven combinations of energy-saving measures, which will lead to optimization of the life-cycle costs with regard to the reference variant represented by a conventional solution. This approach is subsequently verified on three case studies of residential properties with a proposal for the optimal combination of energy-saving measures in the form of photovoltaic panels and a water-air heat pump. The added value of the paper consists of the possibility of optimizing the building construction project from the point of view of energy-saving measures already in the design phase.

One of the major themes of sustainable urban development is adaptation to climate change through the protection, maintenance of existing and creation of new green spaces. In the design areas of the municipal master plan, green spaces are designated for specific ecosystem services, which can be divided into 4 basic categories of regulating, cultural, productive, and supporting services related to biodiversity. Thus, green spaces affect human well-being and can serve as a benchmark to assess the quality of human life. Therefore, it can be concluded that the functioning of green space ecosystem services generates socio-economic impacts, benefits, and harms, for the actors in its surroundings. In their article, the authors focus on describing the specific socio-economic impacts generated by different elements of urban green spaces, quantifying their effects in units of measurement, and outlining possible ways of valuing them. The aim of the research in the longer term is to incorporate monetized benefits and impacts of green spaces into the assessment of the economic efficiency of design areas.

The paper deals with the refinement of the Cost-Benefit Analysis methodological procedure for the assessment of the economic effectiveness of large-scale transport infrastructure projects. The basic input is economic Cash Flow which consists of investment costs, operating income, operating expenses, societal benefits, and harms as well as the investment residual value. According to the methodological guidelines, the currently evaluated project period is considered to be 30 years including the investment phase starting in the first year of the construction, the relevant part of the operational phase, and the residual value of the project in the last year of the assessed period. The evaluation of the economic effectiveness of projects is largely influenced by the determination of the construction economic life. A procedure for calculating the residual value of the project while respecting the gradual implementation of partial constructions was established as part of the research. A case study based on the research sample of several investment construction projects of the highway sections in the Czech Republic demonstrates how this methodological procedure affects the economic effectiveness of the project.

The issue of assessing socio-economic impacts represent a key element of the decisionmaking process on the implementation of major public investment projects. The correctness of the decision depends both on the chosen principle of the socio-economic analysis and the input data. The presented article focuses on updating selected input values for the socio-economic assessment of railway infrastructure projects. Specifically, the simplified values of the estimated rail accidents costs. Accident costs are used for considering the change in the safety. At present, these values, which are also stated in the national methodological resources, are based on statistical data of the entire European Union and thus do not reflect the possible national specifics of projects implemented in the territory of individual Member States. The principle of updating values is from a methodological point of view based on the original calculation principles, however, involves a set of information items on the occurrences that emerged in the past in a specific area. The output of the article is a set of methodological steps considering national conditions when determining the average accident costs, subsequently verified on a case study of the railway network in the Czech Republic. The outputs of the presented article directly build on the results of the research project in which the team of article authors has been involved. The research results refer to different values of accident costs uniformly determined for the entire European Union territory and those determined individually for the conditions of the railway infrastructure in the Czech Republic.

This paper deals with an analysis of causes that lead to the change in price (value of construction costs) of road infrastructure projects in selected phases of the building structure life-cycle, more specifically procurement and construction phases, with the aim to refine the price estimation in the Estimated Value determination phase. The sample of regional road construction projects in the South Moravian Region (Czech Republic) documentation forms the basis for the research. The methodological procedure is aimed at monitoring changes in the value of construction costs during the preparation and implementation phase of the construction. Estimated values, contract prices and actual prices of individual projects are compared to determine them and the reasons for their differences are discussed. The changes (decrease) in the values of construction costs determined by estimated value and contract price show the strong influence of the construction market and the interest of construction companies in the implementation of public works contracts in the field of road infrastructure projects. The relative differences range up to 47%. The changes (increase) in construction costs determined by contract price and actual price are much lower, up to 13%, and result from specific situations during the implementation of the construction, for which subsoil bearing capacity problems and material changes were determined as the most significant.

This article deals with the partial outputs of large-scale infrastructure project risk assessment, specifically in the field of road and motorway construction. The Department of Transport spends a large amount of funds on project preparation and implementation, which however, must be allocated effectively, and with knowledge of the risks that may accompany them. Therefore, documentation for decision-making on project financing also includes their analysis. This article monitors the frequency of occurrence of individual risk factors within the qualitative risk analysis, with the support of the national risk register, and identifies dependent variables that represent part of the economic cash flows for determining project economic efficiency. At the same time, it compares these dependent variables identified by sensitivity analysis with critical variables, followed by testing the interaction of the critical variables’ effect on the project efficiency using the Monte Carlo method. A partial section of the research was focused on the analysis of the probability distribution of input variables, especially “the investment costs” and “time savings of infrastructure users” variables. The research findings conclude that it is necessary to pay attention to the setting of statistical characteristics of variables entering the economic efficiency indicator calculations, as the decision of whether or not to accept projects for funding is based on them.