The issuance of permits will be regulated by three divisions: one that will handle the simplest processes, another for intermediate ones, and a final one for the most complex.
SANTO DOMINGO – “A permit for a hotel with 1,000 rooms is not the same as the construction of a house in an urban area that is already impacted,” said Environment Minister Miguel Ceara Hatton yesterday, who announced the implementation of a plan to reform institutional processes and reduce the entity's response times.
The Ministry of the Environment is among the public entities with the most complaints regarding its slowness in processes such as issuing environmental permits. In fact, construction companies, in a report we published in this same edition, attribute the delays in their projects to the ministry's slowness in renewing permits for the mines where the aggregates are extracted.
Through the new measures, the entire program of the Zero Bureaucracy initiative will be adopted, which seeks to improve regulations and simplify the process of procedures in state institutions.
Ceara Hatton reported that the Ministry is in a stage of systematizing the processes, given the major problem that, in her opinion, is posed by the fact that the population does not know "where their papers are" and is unaware of the path that an environmental permit must follow.
“What we need to improve is for people to know exactly where they stand. Some study processes should last six months, and others a longer time, depending on the type of document being authorized,” Ceara Hatton pointed out.
Divided according to difficulty
Abinader reported that the issuance of permits will be regulated by three divisions: one that will handle the simplest processes, another for intermediate ones, and a final one for the most complex procedures.
Regarding the initiative announced by Abinader, Ceara Hatton indicated that it will entail a series of technical requirements.
“So, there are differences and we simply want that to be reflected in the timing; we did that at the Ministry of Economy when I was there, it's about adapting to the circumstances,” he added.
