Just a suggestion!

No, I have not started anything!
Very few people came forward with any opinion at all and NOBODY offered their help!
So I have dropped the idea completely.
If anybody else would like to do the job please go ahead! I am not going to join.

facebook would be a fantastic idea,have you created it yet?would love to follow it!

Making BIG noise, I was also thinking about creating a critical Costambar profile on Facebook.

Some of you might think that Facebook is only for friends and gossip, however you have the possibility to create company profiles and other kind of profiles too.

Millions of people are using Facebook.

If we all make this Costambar profile our “friend” on our own personal profile, we can invite more people too and the page can grow incredible.

I have realized that many politicians and important people in general have created their profile on Facebook in order to show themselves. So we can invite all these people too..

We can post articles and pictures of whatever we want people to see…

Personally I believe we should show good and nice things too - with pictures - in order not only to pick at everybody. I guess we also want to show the nice part of the project. But we have the possibility to make public whatever we find unfair too.

We can also include Tourism on the North coast in the profile in order to make the group more extended and make more people interested in joining this profile. Almost everything is possible.

Off course the Mayor can delete us from his profile if he finds us too intimidating for example. However other politicians will maybe not delete us and at least we can make some noise!!!

For the people who don’t use Facebook: It is easy, VERY easy to create a profile on Facebook and everybody can learn that.

Because of the fact that Costambar is divided in 3 groups (APC, Neighborhood Association and Los Mangos) I don’t think it is a good idea to do this in the name of ANY association. I don’t mind putting my name as one of the administrators, but I don’t want to do this alone and I would prefer around 10 people putting up their names (at least) . And many names should be Dominicans! We have to reach out for as many people as possible no matter what association they belong to.

Just ANOTHER suggestion! And I do not have any more suggestions for now!

Mark, you definitely didn’t get my point and I will try to explain my suggestion better:

We need help to get the problems solved and I agree with you, that nobody will listen to us if we go ourselves - writing and complaining - we are just insignificant people without the possibility to vote and no authorities care about us.

That is the reason that we have to find more drastic ways to solve some problems and there is nothing better than the press. It is no use to go ourselves complaining to the press, as a matter of fact several APC board members did that already and it didn’t help at all.

We need to pay somebody to make the noise for us! Paying somebody, who belongs to the opposite political party to complain about the bad management of a tourist area and complaining about authorities braking the law. There are people who would love to do it, because they can move votes from one site to another and make themselves stand in a good position. There are lots of radios, televisions and news papers, who would love to have the possibility to pick at the authorities especially if they get paid.

The only thing the politicians are scared of is bad advertisement against them that make them look stupid and incompetent. Big news paper articles about their stupidities.
But it has to be big and again and again. BIG noise!

But off course we have to find somebody we can pay for the help and the articles have to be paid too.. As sad as it may sound: that is the way things work here.

Nobody cares about the laws; with money and influence you solve all kind of issues.

Don't you just love the principle of a free, unbiased press? ............... Which will say what the highest bidder tells it to.

Why should anybody listen to us when we can't even get our own house in order? Costambars' zoning laws are a joke, nobody takes any notice of them.

Let's sort out Costambar before we start trying to tell the Dominicans what they should be doing.

If you don't understand what I'm on about, come down the bar any time between 11am & 5pm & I'll show you several examples.

We have another problem with the local authorities.

You might all know, that there is a river between Cofresi and Costambar. I think it is called Aroyo San Vicente.
Poor families have got the permission to build their houses at the border of that river and they are building A LOT of huts and houses. Apparently the permission to build was given by the Mayor Walter Musa!!

It is not at the part of the river going along Costambar, but further up along Cafemba.
You might think that this will not affect Costambar, but it will !

First of all we are getting to many barrios close to Costambar, which is an security issue!
These people will dump their garbage and their toilets into the river and everything comes out at the ocean and will affect the beach quality in Costambar and Cofresi.
Some weeks ago I read an article about this issue in the local news paper, but at that time, I didn’t know exactly, what they talked about. The article was too small and too insignificant !

It is just incredible, that the Mayor can give such a permit, because they are going against the law. Media Ambient should take some kind of action, but due to political interests they do absolutely nothing.

I have talked to Los Mangos about this problem, but I am not expecting any help from that site. At this moment they are like “going nowhere” in general.

I have come to the point where I believe that the best thing to do is to find a journalist from some news paper, who belongs to the opposite political party. We give this guy some money and he would be happy to talk bad about the local authorities ( for political reasons). Nobody cares about laws, but everybody cares about their political position and the loss of votes.
I believe that many issues could be resolved using this tactic ..

In this way we could get rid of people burning charcoal and the disturbing helicopters, which are flying right over our houses and maybe other problems too.
But who knows a good journalist from a bigger news paper - and from the opposite political party? And we need front pages or WHOLE pages in a bigger news paper.

Right now everybody is very concerned , because tourism in Puerto Plata is very very bad and the expectations for the future are not good either. We would have the possibility to “attack” the authorities blaming them for not taking care or not respecting such an important thing as a tourist area (Costambar and Cofresi)

Just a suggestion!