A special commission that is studying the bill that seeks to declare the Loma Miranda a National Park says that it will hold public hearings in order to listen to opinions from all sectors. The chairman of the Senate commission, Rafael Calderon (PLD-Azua) said that the initiative for holding these hearings in La Vega is aimed at tackling the diverse viewpoints on the issue in the area. Speaking to reporters after the first meeting in this legislative session of the special commission that he chairs, the legislator made it clear that the United Nations has not made its own study of Loma Miranda; all it did was evaluate the study by Falconbridge Dominicana itself.
He stressed that there is a lot of contradictory information, making it difficult to establish whether the environmental losses caused by the proposed project would be greater than the benefits that the country would receive if mining does go ahead. “This is because the information has not always been supported by studies; they are often repeated without necessarily being backed by previous studies,” he stated. He concluded by saying that the Special Commission has received a lot of complementary information from mining, geological, hydraulic and environmental experts.