In this file photo, Jose Ayuyu presides over a meeting of the Commonwealth Ports Authority board of directors.
A YEAR after his appointment to the Commonwealth Ports Authority board of directors and election as its chair, Jose C. Ayuyu submitted his resignation to Gov. Arnold I. Palacios on Tuesday.
“I’m going to resign from the board effective immediately. I am going to deliver the letter today,” Ayuyu said in an interview on Tuesday.
He made the decision more than a week after CPA board members Ramon A. Tebuteb, Thomas “Kiyu” Villagomez, Joseph Diaz and Steve Mesngon ousted him as board chair.
Villagomez and Diaz, the appointees of former Gov. Ralph DLG Torres, and Mesngon, an appointee of Palacios, elected Tebuteb as the new chair and Mesngon as the new vice chair. Tebuteb is also an appointee of the former governor.
Ayuyu immediately vacated his seat. He said he did not make an attempt to lobby for his reelection.
The other CPA board members who were appointed by Gov. Palacios are former vice chair Antonio B. Cabrera and Dolores Kiyoshi, who was not present.
“It’s unfortunate,” Ayuyu said, adding that he has many ideas on how to restore CPA to good standing.
When he was appointed by the governor, Ayuyu said the No. 1 problem he wanted to fix was CPA’s financial condition. The autonomous agency, he added, was in bad shape.
One of the most successful local businessmen on island, Ayuyu owns McDonald’s two branches on Saipan and seven on Guam.
He said as board chair, his primary goal was to prevent CPA’s problems from getting worse. One of the steps he took, in consultation with the administration, was to support the airlines.
In July, Ayuyu pushed for the redemption of a $6 million revenue bond with the Bank of Guam under a 1998 airport bond agreement. This freed CPA from a 26-year-old debt, and allowed it to give Jeju Airlines a discount in airport fees.
“Sometimes you need to spend money to make money,” Ayuyu said. “That’s where the governor and I came in. We want to at least maintain what we have and from there maybe we can increase it by doing this assistance with the airlines,” he added.
Aside from trying to fix CPA’s financial situation, Ayuyu said he also wanted to streamline it as an organization, which, he added, will take time.
“Don’t get me wrong. There are many good employees, but there are also many who need either to be guided or trained about their responsibilities. The very common issue is attendance. It’s a big problem especially when you’re serving the people,” Ayuyu said.
He said the airport management is very lenient. “It is very loose on the way employees perform their jobs and what’s missing is the accountability in doing their job,” he said, adding that it will take time to set a new direction for CPA because many people in the organization “are rooted already and [it’s] very hard to break it away.”
“You really need to redirect the employees on what they must do and what they cannot do,” Ayuyu said.
“If CPA failed to meet the debt-ratio requirement and the bondholder foreclosed, placing CPA in receivership, the receiver would likely cut a significant number of employees,” he added.
Ayuyu said he resigned because he doesn’t believe that, as a regular board member, he is in a position to implement his ideas to help solve CPA’s problems.
‘Sweetheart’ deals
Someone advised him to remain on the board so he could challenge the board’s new leadership. “No I don’t like that,” Ayuyu said. “I’m not into that kind of stuff. I am a problem-solving person. So I better just make way for other people to take over my position because at the end of the day I am also a busy person.”
He said he had also seen “a lot of sweetheart deals.” For example, on Tinian, he said, the Diamond Hotel and Casino is using a very important asset of CPA, “but the revenue generation for CPA is a drop in the bucket, which is ridiculous.” Also, the casino is using CPA property, which he opposes.
“There’s a lot of hanky-panky stuff that is taking place. No wonder CPA cannot be financially sound because a lot of these sweetheart deals charge customers very low. It’s like giving away our place. And so that is where we are right now. That’s the problem,” Ayuyu said.
He also mentioned some of the decisions that he made as chairperson of the board.
1) He declined the request of a company that was seeking exclusive rights to operate at the Port of Tinian.
2) He supported the termination of CPA’s lease agreement with Rota Terminal & Transfer to provide stevedoring services at the Rota seaport.
3) He rejected a request of fellow board members to hire two applicants for unfunded job positions at the Francisco C. Ada/Saipan International Airport, and five applicants at the Benjamin Taisacan Manglona/Rota International Airport.
He said even though the airport was financially struggling, board members appointed by the former governor lobbied to hire their friends.
“Would you believe that? And those are not budgeted. That is the style in the government — instead of cutting the cost, no, they want their friends to come in. It is ridiculous. So I said no, we cannot do things like that. Somebody needs to expose these guys. Now that I’m gone, they are back to the same old thing. Business as usual,” Ayuyu said.
Thankful to Palacios
In his resignation letter, Ayuyu thanked Gov. Palacios for giving him the opportunity to serve the community.
Ayuyu said he told the governor that the “problem” is there are people on the board appointed by the previous administration.
He said he needed a team that would work with him to implement what is necessary so that CPA could help grow the islands’ tourism-based economy.
Unfortunately, he added, the other board members didn’t see it that way.
“The governor listens to me, but the problem is all the things we have accomplished in a year I had to fight for them, and that’s not good,” he said.
“I had to do a lot of convincing, to the point that I got mad because it was a big problem. A lot of it was politics, the way I look at it.”
Variety was unable to get a comment from the other CPA board members.
