Crickets
LET’S take the governor’s reason for abolishing the Commonwealth Casino Commission at face value. “[T]rying economic times,” he says, “necessitate consolidation of duplicative government instrumentalities to ensure that the Commonwealth’s limited fiscal resources are allocated to provision of essential public services….”
Right on.
But what exactly is being “streamlined” in an agency with no staff and a commission that hasn’t seen paychecks in years? The CCC is not funded by the CNMI government. The commission’s expenses are supposed to be covered by the casino regulatory fee, but IPI hasn’t remitted it since October 2020.
So, in abolishing the CCC, where are the “savings” to the CNMI government?
This is comparable to the administration’s claim that it has “reduced” its CUC bills — through an “offset” arrangement.
There are actual ways to reduce the number of redundant agencies as pointed out by the 2020 Fiscal Response Summit, whose participants included the governor and many other incumbent CNMI officials. Their recommendations included merging Youth Affairs with the Division of Youth Services; Fire, Public Safety and Corrections; the “Affairs” offices and DCCA; OGM and DOF; DPW and the mayor’s offices; Commerce and Labor; Finance and Commerce; CDA (now CEDA) and Commerce; Parks & Rec with DPL; NMTI (now NMTech) with NMC; DLNR and DPL. They also proposed a reduction in the number of seats in the House of Representatives and the Senate, which makes more sense today because of the islands’ declining population.
These are proposals that could actually reduce costs and generate savings. “This is something that our Commonwealth should have done a long time ago,” said the then-lieutenant governor over five years ago. This is the third year of his administration as governor.
Where’s the follow-through?
Sleight of words
LAST week, in his SOCA that was as long as a movie, the governor claims that his administration and the Legislature “deserve applause” because they “cut costs” and “balanced the budget.”
But can you cut costs by proposing a government budget that is higher than the previous one? How can the budget be “balanced” if it is not fully funding PSS, medical referrals or utility payments? If the government did cut costs, why is the administration “requesting” hundreds of millions of federal taxpayer dollars — on top of the hundreds of millions of federal funds already allotted for CNMI projects? Why is the governor taking out another loan? Why does he want to raise taxes and fees?
The governor says his critics argue that “the best way to make government finances better is to make government smaller.”
It’s not? Everyone has been saying that it is “since ever since,” including the CNMI Democrats in 1983, and in all caps no less: “We must move away from the MORE GOVERNMENT to the LESS GOVERNMENT philosophy, from GOVERNMENT AS THE EMPLOYER OF FIRST RESORT, to the GOVERNMENT AS EMPLOYER OF LAST RESORT….”
Instead of explaining why a smaller government is not good for the CNMI, the governor abruptly changed the subject by saying that we should stop “picking on the hard-working public servants who work in our government.”
Who is “picking on them”? Who is saying that they should lose their jobs?
The CNMI government is the islands’ largest single employer of voters (who are related to other voters) — we get it. But to ignore waste, redundancy, and inefficiency in order to pander to voter self-interest is something else entirely, even if it’s par for the course in politics.
Meanwhile, frontline agencies such as DPS are getting short-changed as Rep. Vincent S. Aldan noted several months ago. “We need to stop kidding ourselves,” he said. “If you got a lot of these government agencies that are not frontline and do not need to be there, it needs to stop. That’s it.”
Not under this administration though.
