By Gemma Q. Casas
Variety News Staff

Next month, U.S. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne will visit the Northern Marianas and other American insular areas in the Pacific, Variety learned yesterday.
Kempthorne will be the second cabinet secretary of the Bush administration to visit the Northern Marianas.
Then-Interior Secretary Gale Norton visited Saipan in Jan. 2004.
Kempthorne announced his travel plans on Wednesday during Pacific Island Night in Washington, D.C.
Pacific Island Night is an annual event held in conjunction with the Pacific Island Council of Leaders.
Embassies of Pacific island nations and the congressional delegations of U.S. island jurisdictions in the Pacific hosted the event.
Kempthorne said he will visit Guam, the Northern Marianas, American Samoa and the Freely Associated States — the Republic of Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia and the Republic of the Marshall Islands.
“I look forward to visiting the schools, the health care clinics, the villages, the work places. I look forward to meeting as many people as possible, and getting as full an understanding as I can get of their lives, their concerns, their aspirations,” he said in a statement provided to the media.
Kempthorne also announced that Interior’s Office of Insular Affairs 4th Island Business Opportunities will be held in Guam on Oct. 8 and 9.
The conference aims to provide opportunities for business people to meet with their counterparts on the islands to explore ways of promoting business opportunities in their areas.
Jeff Schorr, field representative of the Office of Insular Affairs, said they have no information yet regarding the exact date of Kempthorne’s arrival on Saipan.
“We don’t have any details yet but it’s probably going to be in early June,” Schorr told Variety.
The U.S. Senate confirmed Kempthorne as Interior secretary on May 26, 2006.
A veteran Republican politician, Kempthorne previously served as mayor of Boise, Idaho and later represented the state in the U.S. Senate. In 1998, he ran for governor and won in a landslide. He was re-elected in 2002.
On March 16, 2006, Kempthorne was nominated by President Bush to replace Norton as the 49th secretary of the Interior which oversees more than $300 million in annual funding for the U.S. insular areas as well as assistance to three independent nations freely associated with America.