ASKED to comment on the lawsuit filed by the attorney general, former Department of Community and Cultural Affairs Secretary Robert H. Hunter issued the following statement Thursday:
I did not originally fill out the Category-B Form or submit my time log required for disaster pay. I organized groups of DCCA staff to carry out different aspects of the recovery, from shelter work to residential disaster assessment to community cleanup. I personally organized a group to remove debris and trees from roads and clear access roads to homes. I worked with this group daily for several weeks and while I kept a log of my time for reporting purposes, expected no disaster pay or any other extra pay. Eventually, I was tasked by the Governor’s Chief of Staff to serve as the Mass Care Coordinator for the CNMI. In fact, I was with my debris-cleanup team removing debris from a school in Koblerville, when I was approached about the assignment. I had no desire to leave my work group as we were doing a lot of good cleaning up roads, removing tin, and helping those who had difficulty removing large and large amounts of debris. But, as an employee, I was duty-bound to accept this very complex assignment.
The responsibilities of the Mass Care Coordinator position were enormous. They included management of all of the shelters, the design of a plan and actual physical work involved with setting up a long-term shelter (which ultimately was the former Kagman juvenile facility), working with FEMA and other partners to place orders for materials, arranging shelter medical visits, ordering shelter water deliveries, distributing life-assistance materials to homes, organizing prepared meal deliveries and handouts, distributing Red-Cross assistance to hard-to-access homes, connecting those without homes or in dangerous conditions with the tenting program, among a thousand other tasks on top of continued management of those DCCA programs that were still required to be operational.
It was during this new assignment, at a meeting of local and FEMA staff, that I was asked if I submitted my Category-B form. I told the of FEMA Mass Care Manager that I hadn’t and didn’t intend to. This was in front of several of our CNMI disaster staff. I was told that I needed to and that all FEMA personnel including managers like himself get disaster pay, and that FEMA would not be able to calculate real costs for future disasters if these forms were not submitted. So as instructed I went ahead and submitted the form and my timesheet the following day.
At no time did I ask for any assignment or any extra pay… disaster pay or otherwise. Despite some politically motivated persons suggesting these duties were requested in one way or another. NO WAY! My house was flooded and damaged and my family was home without power for several months. They could have certainly used my help at home. I was assigned a duty and I complied. I was told to submit the Category-B form, and I did.
Furthermore, the Attorney General is wrong on the published figure. Over the course of months I received $13,000, not $17,000. The AG’s office miscalculated the amount and acknowledged that in a communication to me, so I do not understand why they have repeatedly released this figure? I can only surmise it is to paint this as salaciously as possible? I worked the disaster from day one through June of 2019. Many of those days were worked before the sun was up, to well past midnight. The reason I wasn’t in receipt of the $30,000 and above that other long-term recovery workers collected, was I simply didn’t account for all of my actual hours.
So after being harangued by political actors to exact vengeance on their political enemies, the AG several years after-the-fact, decides to go after the employees — who at the time were doing nothing wrong as the Office of Personnel Management and the Administration had approved the pay in-writing and the AG’s office had not challenged that. In fact, at no time during the entirety of the disaster recovery event, and with personnel from the AG’s office stationed daily at the Joint Recovery Office, was disaster pay ever questioned or challenged by his office. At no time during the course of the many months of the disaster recovery effort did the AG notify OPM, the Administration, the JFO section set up to review expenditures, or any of the employees, that there was any issue with the disaster pay. If it is the case that it was improperly paid, Attorney General Manibusan was thoroughly negligent in not addressing this at the very beginning, and seemingly not addressing it until put under political pressure years later.
Instead of going after those that broke their backs doing the recovery work, and several years after the fact, the Attorney General should have worked with the legislature to amend the law so that CNMI-staff assigned these duties weren’t and aren’t in the future, treated like second-class employees. You had locally assigned personnel who make a fraction of what their federal counterparts make, doing the brunt of the work, and several years later it is suggested they do that without similar disaster pay received by their federal counterparts? Is that the goal here? This is absurd.
The Attorney General’s Office is more culpable and negligent in this matter than anyone else, including the OPM and the Administration. After all, this is the office that should be reviewing written guidance from OPM and issuances of directives based on that guidance, for legality. This apparently wasn’t done. Instead, the AG’s office, having been grossly remiss of their duty, seeks to financially harm employees four years after-the-fact, for a matter that was not the fault of any of these employees. Our only fault was to agree to months of back-breaking difficult work at the expense of our own households and families.
That individuals now going after those that carried out the work of what was a tremendous recovery by any standard, were nowhere to be seen themselves during the many months of actual recovery work, says a lot about what the motivation here is.
Trying to extract the pay that was provided to people for work they carried out, under what was understood by all at the time, to be legal and warranted, and thus unchallenged by the AG at the time, is simply wrong.
Robert H. Hunter
