During the cabinet meeting held in San Cristobal this past weekend, cabinet members took turns announcing public works and social welfare projects that are planned for the Province. Education Minister Milagros Ortiz Bosch said that twenty new schools would be built and fifteen renovated, at a cost of DR$38 million. Public Health Minister Jose Rodriguez Soldevilla stated that rural clinics and dispensaries will be built, 351 new hospital beds will be added, and a new X-ray laboratory will be established. The Environmental Minister, Frank Moya Pons, announced that the Pomier Cave – a neglected repository of pre-Colombian petroglyphs that has been declared a "Heritage of Humanity" site by the U.N. – will be reconditioned as a tourist attraction. Moya Pons also said that the extraction of sand and gravel from the Province’s riverbeds would be sharply curtailed. Other provincial projects include; the creation of a new four-lane highway to the City of Bani, forty kilometers to the West, new pedestrian overpasses for major municipal thoroughfares, new aqueducts, the rehabilitation of vast agricultural lands for the cultivation of coffee and cacao, and new sources of financing from the Agricultural Bank. (7 November 2000)
