Santo Domingo.- Territorial Ordering director Franklin Labour yesterday said despite that all of the country’s land use plans have failed because they’ve been “shoved in a desk,” he’s confident that with the bill being drafted by the Territorial Ordering and Development Agency (DGODT, formerly Conau), will be different.

Quoted by newspaper El Caribe, the official said the belts of poverty and real estate projects for the middle and upper classes are devastating Greater Santo Domingo’s wetlands.

He said his agency conducts a study of a vast area which in his view the Government need to preserve, called “Santo Domingo’s Green Belt,” but has been affected by the capital’s urban sprawl.

However Labour noted that entities such as the Environment Ministry must protect areas such as that zone’s wetlands, some of which it has already assumed their regeneration. “We already concluded the bill’s first draft to create the unified region planning system, which is part of a master plan in a regionalization law. You know that regionalization is established by decree in our country, but there’s a legal mandate, inclusively constitutional, to work the regionalization.”

He stated his confidence that the bill will be submitted to Congress no later than April. “Although the country has been waiting for the law for a long time, the legal mandate was invoked just three years ago. Territorial Ordering and Development Agency, which is born June, 2008, is barely three years old.”