THE Truth Be Told, this is not about the Director at the Assistance Program whom I believe is doing her very best with the limited resources at her disposal. This is about the FAILURE to DO by the Governor & Elected Officials as a whole, as some members of the Legislature and the Democrat Party have shown-up to HELP! However, it is obvious the Governor and everyone in Office KNEW there was going to be a MASSIVE DEMAND placed on the Assistance Program to implement the D-NAP but there was NO Collective Effort to address this massive storm of People who would need to be processed. The Governor even admitted he knew it was be a Massive-Storm-Of-People applying for the D-NAP and you don’t need a College Degree to know the Director over the Program was going to need HELP (Boots-On-the-Ground), not having to depend solely upon voluntary staff support – Send HELP not Excuses and Suggestions for Being-In-Line Suffering!
There are 29 Officials in the Legislature & over a dozen Government Departments in the Governor’s Cabinet who could have sent one or two of their staff to be trained to help over a two-week period that would have multiplied the processing capability to nearly 100 — meaning instead of 70 People a day being processed to 700 or more a day. However, they were NEVER thinking about How-WE-Would-Suffer, not to mention the long-drawn-out process that results in an additional two or more lining-up steps that should have been a “one-stop-process” had the staffing met the NEED! So, SEND HELP Governor & Officials, not excuses and suggestions on how to endure the suffering of being in line for HOURS with no breakfast nor lunch break only to be turned away to come back and get in line AGAIN!
There is really No-Excuse for the Governor, as he KNEW of the pending chaos and had plenty of prior-notice & time to train additional staff to increase the processing capacity by the Hundreds a Day instead of just 70, which was PATHETIC and it’s on our leaders! The problem was our Governor & Officials, especially those NO-SHOW officials, but they still want to SIT again. I hope the stewards (voters) of the CNMI will take note and make sure the No-Show Officials don’t get your vote for FAILING to DO Something FOR the People who hired them when they were NEEDED. However, THANKS & KUDOS to the Officials & the Democrat Party (the People’s Party) for voluntarily showing-up and HELPING!
However, the CNMI is now asking for MORE TIME, a very familiar excuse that is Almost-Always used by our leaders when it comes to Federal Requirements & Mandates, even pointing a finger at the Feds as part of the excuse, which is WHY the Feds don’t trust the CNMI anymore for the Billions in WASTED Federal Funding under Republicans — HELLER! There should have been an additional workforce near a HUNDRED or MORE led by the Governor’s Office, Senators & Representatives who were ALL Elected to “Protect & SERVE the People” — so PLEASE, Can We Get Some Service with the D-NAP! One People One Direction for Voters to CHANGE the CNMI for the Better in November!
Ambrose M. Bennett is an Economist who minored in Sociology, a Political Scientist, a retired teacher & former CNMI Board of Education Member, a James Madison Fellow (U.S. Constitutional Scholar), a Fulbright-Hays-Lifetime Humanities & Religious Scholar who resides in Kagman III in the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.
