The Municipalities That Couldn't Find the Corridor

Last week we worked through two audits the Contraloría General de la República published in 2025, one on SINAC and one on SETENA, the national agencies that decide whether a project is environmentally viable and what may be cut from a forest. On May 21, 2026, the same division of the Contraloría, its Área de Fiscalización para el Desarrollo Sostenible, issued a document one step further down the chain. Order DFOE-SOS-ORD-00002-2026 is addressed to the offices that actually hand an applicant the permit to build: six municipal governments along the southern Pacific.

This one did not begin inside the Contraloría. It began with a citizen complaint, a gestión filed on September 30, 2025 by former deputy Ariel Robles on denuncias raised by the Comisión Alianza Comunal del Corredor Biológico Paso de la Danta, over construction permits granted on environmentally fragile land in the canton of Osa. The Contraloría opened a preliminary investigation, requested records from each municipality and from SETENA and SINAC, and on May 21 issued the result as a binding order to the municipalities of Osa, Pérez Zeledón, Quepos, Dota, Buenos Aires and Tarrazú, together with SINAC and MINAE's Dirección de Agua. It is an order from an investigation, not an audit like the two before it, but it carries the same enforcement weight.

The corridor matters for what it joins. The Paso de la Danta runs along the Fila Costeña, the coastal range parallel to the Pacific, linking the Los Santos forest reserve and the Cordillera de Talamanca down to the Marino Ballena national park and the Térraba-Sierpe wetland. Most of its forest cover sits in two blocks, one of 4,982 hectares and one of 40,395.

The order spells out what that connectivity is for. It names four focal elements the corridor exists to hold together: the two blocks of forest; a route that lets large mammals move between the Los Santos reserve, Marino Ballena and the Térraba-Sierpe wetland; the watersheds of the Morete, Higuerón and Uvita rivers; and the coastal strip with its sea-turtle nesting beaches. The watersheds are where building in the hills reaches the sea. Heavy rain on cleared slopes washes sediment down those rivers and into the bay, and the order records that this load "ha provocado en el pasado la desaparición de ciertos grupos de organismos de los arrecifes del Parque Nacional Marino Ballena" (has in the past caused the disappearance of certain groups of reef organisms at Marino Ballena). A permit granted up in the hills is, in part, a decision about the reef downstream.

The agencies we covered last week decide whether a project is viable; the municipality issues the building permit. The Contraloría's question was plain: when a municipality grants that permit inside this corridor, does it check what is on the ground first?

In all six cantons, the answer was no. The municipality issued the permit once the file held the required documents. The Contraloría's finding was that none of the six performed environmental review as part of granting a permit; the condition of the site was simply not part of the procedure. Nothing in the process required a check with SETENA, SINAC or the Dirección de Agua when an application fell on land that might hold forest, water recharge or a fragile ecosystem. SETENA, for its part, processed 259 environmental viability files inside the corridor and the Fila Costeña for 2024 and 2025, every one of them opened by a developer, none of them prompted by a municipality.

The zoning plans that would normally tell a municipality where it can and cannot build barely exist here. Dota and Tarrazú have no plan regulador at all. Osa's only zoning plan is a partial one covering the district of Cortés, drafted in 1997 after Hurricane César, which leaves most of the canton, the corridor included, unzoned. Pérez Zeledón's plan reaches only the urban centers of two of its ten districts. Buenos Aires and Quepos have plans for specific urban or coastal sectors, neither of which covers the corridor. Both governing documents for the corridor itself, its 2018-2023 management plan and the national corridors program's 2018-2025 strategic plan, have expired.

What the Municipalities Told the Auditor

The order quotes the municipalities' own answers to the auditor. Asked how it incorporates the environmental variable, the Municipalidad de Osa told the Contraloría that it does not produce its own scientific studies on environmental fragility, hydrology or biodiversity, because it lacks the competence and the resources, and that it has neither the technical nor the legal competence to draw up official lists of plant and animal species. It also reported that its own draft regulation for issuing construction permits had been sitting with the municipal council since May 5, 2023 with no answer.

Three of the six told the auditor the corridor was not their concern. Buenos Aires stated that the Paso de la Danta does not cover its territory. Tarrazú reported that its cadastral tools show no corridor land in the canton. Dota said it had not identified any area within its territory that forms part of the corridor. The order sets these answers beside the map the national corridors program supplied, which shows the Paso de la Danta crossing all six cantons: Osa, Pérez Zeledón, Quepos, Dota, Buenos Aires and Tarrazú. The Contraloría also noted that the corridor's boundary has been available for consultation in the national territorial information system, the SNIT, at a scale of 1:5000, since 2019.

The other answers pointed at the same gap. Pérez Zeledón did not deny the corridor, but said that with the cartography it had, it could not identify which properties fall inside the Fila Costeña or the corridor. Quepos acknowledged that the corridor covers a significant part of the canton, then said it had no system tying a permit application to that boundary. Where an environmental check entered the process at all, it was the SETENA viability the developer brought, a document the municipality received rather than a review it ran itself.

On one point all six lined up: none ran a formal program to train the staff who issue permits on the environmental side of the work. A few mentioned occasional outside courses, Pérez Zeledón some of them run by SETENA, but in none of the six was it a standing part of the job. That gap is what the order's training directive, the last of the six it imposes, is meant to close.

The Contraloría presented its preliminary findings to the institutions on May 20, 2026. SINAC, the Dirección de Agua and the mayors of Osa, Dota and Buenos Aires took part, along with a Tarrazú urban-control department official. The mayors of Pérez Zeledón and Quepos, the order notes, were summoned and did not attend.

A Duty Without a Prohibition

On the law, the municipalities had a point, and the two agencies said so. Asked directly, SETENA told the Contraloría that no rule prohibits, restricts or limits a construction permit simply because a project sits inside a biological corridor, and that a corridor's management plan does not bind private property. SINAC added that a biological corridor is not itself an Área Ambientalmente Frágil, the legal category that triggers heightened review, though it can contain them.

The Contraloría's reply is the part of this order with reach beyond these six cantons. The absence of a specific prohibition, it held, does not remove the municipality's duty to look. Where there is reasonable doubt that a site holds forest, a water source or a fragile ecosystem, the local government is obliged to consult the competent agency before it issues the permit, under the preventive and precautionary principles and the standard of in dubio pro natura written into Article 11 of the Biodiversity Law. The duty to check does not wait for a rule that names the corridor. And the information needed to check has been public since 2019.

Underneath that duty sits a constitutional doctrine the courts have built over almost thirty years. Since 1998 the Sala Constitucional, Costa Rica's constitutional chamber, has held that a state decision touching the environment cannot rest on political judgment, economic pressure or guesswork; it has to be grounded in serious, individualized technical study. The chamber calls this the objetivación, the making-objective, of the constitutional principle of reasonableness in environmental matters. The principle, in its words, "obliga a que las normas que se dicten con respecto a esta materia estén debidamente motivadas en estudios técnicos serios" (requires that decisions in this matter be duly grounded in serious technical studies). The study is what makes the decision lawful; a permit issued without it is, in this line of cases, an arbitrary act.

That is the standard the order holds the municipalities to. A construction permit is the kind of administrative act the doctrine governs, and a documentary checklist is not the individualized study it asks for. The municipalities do not have to carry out that study themselves; the duty the Contraloría describes is to go and get it, by asking the agencies that hold the data whenever a site raises a reasonable doubt. The doctrine reaches well past any single permit. In 2019 the Sala used it, together with the rule against rolling back environmental protection, to strike down a law that had shrunk the Gandoca-Manzanillo wildlife refuge, the same refuge, and the same ruling, that ran through last week's piece, and the Contraloría cites that decision here. A municipal building permit on the Pacific coast and an act of the Legislative Assembly answer, in the end, to the same constitutional test.

The Order, and What It Does Not Reach

The order is binding, not a recommendation, and it comes with a calendar. There are six directives, three to the agencies and three to every municipality.

Article 69 of the Contraloría's organic law makes sustained, unjustified non-compliance a serious offense that can cost the responsible official their post.

What the order does not do is reach the permits already granted. It is prospective. It builds the environmental check into the next application and says nothing about the 259 viabilities or the construction permits already issued in the corridor over 2024 and 2025. The Comisión Alianza Comunal has asked the Contraloría to clarify whether files already in process fall within the order's scope, and that request is pending. For now the order settles one thing the six municipalities had treated as an open question. The Fila Costeña supplies water to the communities below it and forms a first line of protection for the reef at Marino Ballena, and a permit to build in it can no longer be issued on a checklist that leaves the corridor off the page.