By Dave Davis
For Variety

We watch and wait as the governor, the legislature, the public auditor and the attorney general all allege and assert that they’re vigorously attacking the ‘huge problem’ of determining just where GovGuam stands on borrowing authority versus Organic Act limitations. That’s all smoke and mirrors, of course. It’s a simple calculation involving only two core values: the current public debt and the real estate tax roll assessed value.
They already know, or should know, but they don’t want you to know. There’s a reason — perhaps several reasons, depending on their separate agendas — why they don’t want you to know that GovGuam has already violated that borrowing limit by as much as $200 million.
In the governor’s case, it’s because he wants to borrow another huge sum to burden this and future generations with onerous debt — and that’s because he doesn’t know how to otherwise ‘lead’ an inept and insolvent government toward better times.
The legislature, equally challenged in matters of leadership, toys with the governor’s pleas to borrow more money while trying to find a way to blame someone else for the inevitable, badly needed and long overdue shrinkage of the GovGuam payroll.
The public auditor, who, in a July 2003 letter, advised the governor that borrowing an additional $400 million presented no problem relative to the debt limit, at first seemed reluctant to publicly revise her opinion, recent Supreme Court ruling notwithstanding. She has now publicly acknowledged (K-57, April 17) that she believes, in accordance with generally accepted accounting practices and principles, that GovGuam public debt exceeds the Organic Act limitation.
She declined to estimate by how much, and hedged her comment by pointing at the attorney general as the final authority on the ‘legal’ determination of what constitutes public debt. Nevertheless, she’s a CPA and the authority on GovGuam finances and analyses thereof, and should be intimately familiar with the subject of public debt. That figure is all that’s needed, really, to immediately and precisely identify our current financial position. We already know the assessed property value, certified by the Board of Equalization.
The attorney general, meanwhile, continues with her verbal tap-dance on the issue as she has done with everything of substance since taking office. Apparently lacking any convictions or will of her own, she asserts that she’s “studying it,” and doesn’t know when the study may be finished. What she’s really doing is waiting to see which way the political wind blows so that she can provide some innocuous opinion calculated to offend nobody — waiting, as it were, for someone else to provide her with her opinion. I could help with that. I already know the answer, but chances are she wouldn’t value my input.
Now here’s the nitty-gritty, down-and-dirty reason why decades of government obfuscation, misdirection and outright lies is important to you, the taxpayer. How things shake out now, in the current term, can profoundly affect your personal financial health over the next few decades. It’s entirely possible that, despite U.S. Supreme Court cautionary comments identifying the hovering specter of legislative ‘mischief’, our political windsocks may fiddle with the real estate tax law to allow the governor to borrow more money, submerging us further into what the Supreme Court called “crushing debt.”
So: you now have ample evidence of historical and current attempts by this and former administrations to manipulate real estate taxes, and the contents of your wallet, in furtherance of their political agendas. How do you like it?