The House recently adopted a resolution “requesting” the governor for more transparency in his disaster declarations. The House is troubled by “the broad, sweeping and regular use of executive emergency authority to suspend any CNMI regulatory statute and to sidestep procurement regulations to deal with emergency conditions that have not been directly supported with sufficient information.” According to the House, “[C]ontinued reliance on…such extraordinary authority is ill-advised and continued resort to such authority serves to promote poor planning and coordination by the administration, undermines the quality and integrity of our procurement procedures and ultimately proves costly as regular procurement procedures are sidestepped in favor of often costly sole source or emergency procurement.”
This is all correct, but perhaps too wordy for the administration.
So let’s spell it out more clearly. Mr. Governor, you, the lt. governor and your cabinet are running an administration of endless disaster emergencies. But the real disaster is your administration. If you, the lt. governor and your cabinet want to see an end to these emergencies take our advice: resign.
A runoff election for delegate
NEARLY every Tom, Dick, and Harry joined the political race for one non-voting delegate seat, splitting the vote nine ways, which means that the winning candidate will have a seat in the U.S. Congress with the support of only over 2,000 CNMI voters. The current governor won office with just 3,000 votes, a result that prompted a legislative initiative requiring a 50-plus-one majority in a gubernatorial election.
The winning candidates, to be sure, won fair and square, but with such small margins they cannot be said to represent the majority of their community, and this is a handicap for them.
For the sake of the CNMI and its delegate to the U.S. Congress, local lawmakers should consider legislation requiring a runoff if no delegate candidate receives a 50-plus-one majority.
Why politics and healthcare don’t mix
THE administration is already preparing for next year’s elections. According to the Retirement Fund, the administration has hired 600 new employees. More positions are being vacated to accommodate political operatives. The contract of the deputy secretary of Public Health was not renewed and no reason was given to indicate why such an important position held by an extremely competent and non-political official had to be vacated at this time. There are indications that this was a political decision advanced by the governor’s core political supporters.
Coincidentally, the non-renewal occurred at the same time as the governor’s reversal of Public Health’s decision to suspend Island Medical Center’s license. License suspension is not a small matter and not an easy decision to make or sustain, and is taken to protect the public interest.
But like so many things these days, it is increasingly difficult to make out what the administration is doing at Public Health to elevate the level of healthcare delivery. Budget excuses and lax oversight on the part of lawmakers have allowed administration officials to carve out lucrative services to out-source nursing contracts and ambulance services, among other items, to groups that remain unknown. No one, for example, seems to be able to explain who exactly told nonresident, non-English-speaking nurses that they could be interns at CHC.
Morale is at an all-time low at CHC as some of its most seasoned employees pack their bags for greener pastures, leaving the hospital with newer, less experienced staff, along with a longer list of needs than ever before.
We have already seen in the case of CUC how a key agency can be drilled into the ground by incompetence and indifference.
The CNMI cannot afford to see the same thing happen to its only hospital.
