The governor apparently has yet to notice that the local community is against the idea of spending at least $400,000 of taxpayer money on a lawsuit that will not prevent the inevitable. The people and most of their lawmakers are now eager to move forward and prepare the CNMI for the coming changes.
The governor and his advisers, for their part, should stop living in the past. They should realize that their doomsday arguments do not resonate in a community that is already suffering from daily power outages, the rising cost of living, and an economy that is dying under the governor’s watch. The people no longer believe a word he says, this governor who promised Better Times.
What the public wants to see are long-term solutions to the power crisis, the adjustments that should be made for next year’s implementation of the federalization law, and more ways to get federal help.
The governor’s insistence that the bankrupt CNMI government should sue the feds while begging for more federal assistance is indeed silly, as a lawmaker has noted. It also indicates how hopelessly out of touch the governor is with the more pressing concerns of the people he swore to serve.
“Because the imported Aggreko generators will not be fully operational until mid-September,” the governor said in a letter to BOE, “CUC will not be in a position to provide reliable utility services for the traditional opening of our public schools after the summer break.”
This is a misleading statement. It implies that CUC can provide dependable services, which it has not been able to do since this administration was sworn into office. It also ignores the fact that PSS has already delayed the opening of its classes in an effort to reduce its CUC bills now that the governor wants public schools to pay for their own utilities — without giving them additional funding.
The administration claims that it doesn’t want to “have a situation where students attend school and a significant power outage occurs.” As if the students have not been suffering from power outages, at their homes and in their classrooms, since last year.
PSS, in any case, is “pretty much ready and set to go,” according to its administrators, who should know.
But considering that the CNMI must endure 16 more months of this Better Times administration, PSS will continue to need the assistance of parents, businesses and other members of the community. The current crisis is also a challenge for PSS and the community to be more creative and more responsive to the needs of the students.
We believe that PSS and the community are up to the challenge.
