The administration has no excuses. It must comply with Rep. Tina Sablan’s Open Government Act request.
The Open Government Act declares that all government offices “exist to aid in the conduct of the people’s business.” The people of this commonwealth, the law states, “do not yield their sovereignty to the agencies which serve them. The people, in delegating authority, do not give their public servants the right to decide what is good for the people to know and what is not good for them to know. The people insist on remaining informed so that they may retain control over the instruments they have created.”
The Legislature, which also opposes the federalization lawsuit, should back Representative Sablan’s Open Government Act request and take this administration to court, if need be.
There is no shortage of problems, but cooperation and agreement on the solutions must be the key to this summit. It is also important to remember that the CNMI is on the threshold of a general election year, and a lot of things are promised whenever politicians need your votes. Candidate Fitial promised a solution to CUC’s woes within six months of taking office — 900 days later, he and his team are only beginning to get at these problems.
Government fiscal matters and the budgets must also be discussed during the summit. It is not difficult to calculate that there will not be much government service to offer if the largest part of the budget is for payroll. The people should take note of this fact as the governor prepares to veto the budget bill. The governor, as we now all know, is consistent on a few matters — in his outright contempt for balanced budgets, and refusal to suspend hiring despite poor collection figures.
Positions are filled — more quickly than the neighborhood tank — with employees who submit to only cursory review and criteria. Burrowing supporters in the system is an old political scheme for securing reliable voters, but it is a useless exercise in the end because if these employees cannot or do not perform well, the public will kick out their employers on election day.
No one, for example, would object to hiring a bunch of employees for CUC if the power situation actually improved — but it hasn’t. Similarly, no one would object to the spate of hiring at CHC using federal dollars, if these employees were qualified and critical to health care — but they’re not.
All these actions would be water off a duck’s back if the government does not affect life in the commonwealth in so many negative ways. But whenever it fails to pay the Retirement Fund, the livelihood of thousands of retirees are threatened. Whenever it fails to pay CUC, it triggers rate increases. Every time it fails to pay vendors, businesses and their workers suffer. The list, unfortunately, goes on.
There is, clearly, no dearth of topics for the economic summit. But once it has been organized and concluded, we hope the participants are long on “stick-to-it-ness” because it’s the one thing in short supply.
