REPRESENTATIVE Celina R. Babauta said she takes personally Gov. Ralph DLG Torres’ “insidious failures” to support military veterans.
“I find it quite disheartening to read about the resignation of Office of Veterans Affairs Executive Officer Stanley Iakopo due to the governor’s lack of support,” Babauta said in the miscellaneous part of the House session on Tuesday.
She said her 33 years of direct and indirect involvement with the U.S. Army gave her the strongest respect for everyone who wears the uniform. “It is a community I am proud to belong to, and I will always seek out anyway that I can to support veterans and their families,” she added.
Babauta, whose husband is a military veteran, said military men and women “leave their families to protect ours.”
She said Iakopo “is one of those…. It’s about time we kept our promise to them. Yet the administration has shut its eyes to the mental, physical and emotional scars of all veterans and their families. This administration has closed its ears to their cries for help. It is absolutely unacceptable.”
Babauta added, “Our veterans fought the enemy abroad. They should not have to fight their government at home to get the healthcare they have earned over and over again. The governor’s failures are even more insidious because they are too often unseen. He has traded in our troops’ healthcare, and he has traded on our veterans’ service for votes. It’s long past time that ended. It’s long past time we said: Never in our Commonwealth. Never again.”
Rep. Vicente Camacho said, “I was fired from that job back in 2015. This whole time, I thought about it.”
He said the governor “does whatever he wants to do there,” referring to the Veterans Affairs Office. It was always the governor’s call, he said, so it was no surprise to him that Iakopo resigned.
Town hall meetings
In an interview, Iakopo said he wants to “set the record straight” about what the governor stated regarding town hall meetings.
Iakopo said there were a total of eight town hall meetings that he conducted as executive officer of Veterans Affairs.
According to Iakopo, he had already initiated two town hall meetings on Saipan and one on Tinian before the governor told him to do so.
The governor attended only one of these town hall meetings when it was held in Kagman last year, Iakopo said.
In the following town hall meetings, Iakopo said, “I asked him to come but he did not want to.”
Iakopo said the governor also denied his request for military leave. He added that it was not the first time the governor denied his request for leave.
When he requested leave so he could join the Pacific Mini Games in June, he said the governor denied his request.
When he asked why, he said the governor told him that he, the governor did not like that Iakopo planned to carry the American Samoa flag.
