Tenorio, Covenant-Saipan, on Tuesday revealed that she offered Santos $1.8 million in appropriation for the Rota gaming commission if she could convince the Rota senators to support the Saipan casino bill.
Santos, Ind.-Rota, in an email yesterday said Tenorio’s statement was “misleading and inaccurate.”
She said the Saipan casino bill, which the House of Representatives passed but was rejected by the Senate during a session on Tinian, proposed to appropriate 25 percent of the Saipan casino earnings for Rota and Tinian.
But she denied that Tenorio offered or made a deal with her before or after the deliberations on the casino bill.
The $1.8 million that Tenorio mentioned was the earmark she proposed in her H.B. 17-23, which would allot a certain percentage of Marianas Public Land Trust revenues for Rota gaming commission employees in fiscal years 2011 and 2012.
That, Santos said, “was merely a bill and not a deal with the speaker for the passage of his casino bill.”
In a separate interview, Tenorio said the deal was verbally made during the House leadership’s meeting with Gov. Benigno R. Fitial last month.
Tenorio said he made that offer to Santos in front of the governor and other members of the House leadership.
He reiterated that he was glad the deal did not materialize because he realized later on that MPLT funds should not be used for such purposes.
Asked for comment, Santos said: “Let us forgive him for he knows not what he’s saying.”
Tenorio earlier removed Santos from the House leadership for voting with the minority bloc during the lengthy and contentious budget deliberations.
