The government has announced that Costa Rica is to get a ‘facelift’ next year in regards to ensuring the country’s sustainable development programs. The National Technical Secretariat of the Environment Ministry (SETENA) which looks at environmental-impact studies for all the main developments in Costa Rica, will see its available funds increase from ¢441 million to massive ¢1.1 billion, a rise of 147%.

The SETENA agency is known for being notoriously slow and inefficient, creating a bottleneck of applications that continuously frustrate developers and environmentalists. The Vice-Minister of Economy, Jorge Woodbridge, stated that the funds will significantly go into improving the performance of the agency including more employees as currently only 35, of which 11 who are solely dedicated to SETENA, work for the agency and struggle to deal with an average of 4,000 development applications every year.

Other improvements would see that by May 2008 the current backlog for applications would be eliminated and that the processing time for the applications would see a dramatic fall from 6-24 months down to approximately 5 weeks. These dramatic changes will mainly be incurred by the introduction of a new online system that means that developers can submit applications from the comfort of their own office rather than queue in the cluttered confines of the small SETENA building in San Jose.

This is great news for developers looking to invest in new buildings or who are thinking of opening businesses in Costa Rica. By the middle of next year, the long and complicated process that is currently in place will be eradicated and a much quicker one put in to replace it. With an increasing tourism industry, 2008 looks to be a great time of year to invest in Costa Rica.

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