It reads like an exemption. Works that no longer need a permit look like works with fewer obligations. Article 297 says otherwise, and says it somewhere few people reach: liability was not reduced, it was moved.
From here on this is reading and opinion. The text comes first.
What the article says
Paragraphs (1) to (3) are already set out on the page about the notificare simplificată, in its section on liability, so I will not repeat them here. In short: the primărie does not answer for litigation or encumbrances over the property, the notificare has the role of a declaration on your own responsibility, and urbanism and quality regulations remain mandatory.
Two paragraphs are worth pulling forward, though, because summaries lose them.
Paragraph (4) splits liability for breaching those rules between three parties, not one: the beneficiary, the designers and the executants.
Paragraph (5) is the one I would put on the first page of any guide: execution is carried out mandatorily on the basis of a technical execution design with simplified content, produced by specialist technical teams.
Paragraph (6) prohibits the notificare route where it would breach the provisions on environmental impact assessment or the requirements for special-status properties belonging to SNAOPSN.
What I think about it
This simplification is honest, and that is exactly why it is harsher than it looks.
Under the permit regime, someone outside looks at your dossier beforehand. That check does not absolve you, but it produces a moment where an error can be caught by somebody other than you. The notificare removes the moment. Paragraph (2) says so directly: you are the one declaring that the conditions are met.
The consequence I see missed most often is not legal, it is about timing. If nobody looks beforehand, the only remaining check is the one afterwards, and the one afterwards does not discuss, it orders.
The second, missed just as often, is paragraph (5). People read simplified and understand without a designer. The text says simplified content, not absence, and it names the author: specialist technical teams. Works on a notificare without a technical design are not cheaper works, they are works carried out outside their own regime.
Where the balance sits, to my mind
I do not think article 297 is unfair. I think it is badly understood, and that the misunderstanding has a simple cause: people read it after they have already decided their works fall under the notificare, not before.
The right order is the reverse. First read who answers, then decide whether you want that to be you. In many cases the answer stays yes, and that is fine. But it becomes a choice, rather than a discovery at the first inspection.
Which works take this route is described on the page about the notificare simplificată.
On the same theme, where criminal liability begins covers the hard end of the same line, and what counts as an intervention clarifies the boundary from the other regime.
This article is analysis, not legal advice. Provisions are cited from Legea 169/2026, published in Monitorul Oficial no. 661 of 10 August 2026. Check your own situation with the issuing authority. Romanian legal terms are kept in the original, because the Romanian text is the one that governs.