By Zaldy Dandan
Variety Editor

No one knows

WAGE and immigration issues are front and center again, but this time it looks like something may happen, but what that might be, no one knows. U.S. Senate staffers who are now experts in CNMI wage and immigration issues offer advice on how to rejuvenate the local economy. Even if this advice is good, however, it isn’t likely to be anything CNMI officials haven’t heard before.
There is no doubt that a sudden wage hike will result in job losses in the private sector and its profligate dependent, the government. On the immigration side, no one knows what the impact of federalization will be because no one has studied it.
Federal employees don’t worry about such considerations because they won’t live with the results. Local officials haven’t worried about it because they believed that the day would never come. But it has.

All eyes on CUC

MEANWHILE, locals continue to head for greener pastures in the states and scores of nonresident workers are also leaving because of job losses and factory closures. There are, moreover, thousands of people at the food stamp office, with hundreds more in utility and housing subsidy lines. All this is having a profound effect on retail, wholesale and services in the CNMI.
The good news is that because their bloated and wasteful government can no longer deliver the services it promised, the people of the commonwealth can now become more self-reliant.
The people’s hardship, however, has also created an opportunity for unscrupulous government officials to privatize assets and outsource services, which are all good concepts — but open to abuse.
CUC, for example, has announced that it will privatize utility services but has yet to disclose how and who prepared the studies and recommendations, who and what parameters were considered in developing the request for proposals, and why it costs so much just to be qualified to look at bid documents.
CUC officials will say that the high cost will keep riff-raff out, when exactly the opposite will happen. If these officials were sincere about attracting only qualified firms, they would simply operate transparently and professionally, and this would send the desired signal. But making the cost of obtaining pre-qualification documents so high will have the reverse effect, signaling to responsible and responsive firms that something is not right at the utilities corporation.
It is also “convenient” that no one knows who is really in charge at CUC. Its executives? The still non-existent PUC? An advisory board? The governor and lt. governor?

About PSS

HOW tough would it have been for public school officials to look out the window and determine on Sunday or Monday that the weather probably wasn’t going to clear and that schools should not open?
Instead, on Tuesday mid-morning, school officials and parents were scrambling to coordinate school closures and transportation issues. This is a comparatively minor matter, to be sure, but it is one piece in a cloth cut in odd ways. It reflects leadership that has made questionable decisions that have to be later reversed, creating more confusion and more problems with morale, as most poor decisions will.
PSS procurement is still rife with poorly crafted scopes, poor evaluations and poorer selections that must be changed later. PSS human resources, an office staffed up as never before, cannot process paper any faster or more competently even with extra hands. These are all indications that the process needs a make-over, that staff and work organization need to be evaluated and restructured to give the students, teachers and administrators the support they need to make decisions within days and weeks, not months and years.
No issue in the commonwealth is more important than education, but education quality still lags behind most of the states. This is principally because some top education officials and some board members pre-occupy themselves with feel-good programs and personnel choices that do little more than support their own limited points of view, handicapping the future of the commonwealth, and further complicating the labor and wage calculations locally.
Current PSS leaders are not exclusively responsible for decisions that took decades to formulate, but these individuals have been an integral part of the system the whole time, and there is no indication that they appreciate the new requirements facing the CNMI. If it weren’t for the federal requirements of No Child Left Behind, for example, would the school system have required teacher qualifications or developed a new focus on student achievement?