Globe Trotting Legislature

The Issue: Over the last four years the legislature spent $1,159,566 flying unfriendly skies with taxpayers money!

Our View: The taxpayers money is best spent on education, health and other essentials at a time when revenue generation has gone south.

The administration deserves the accolades of all taxpayers for cutting travel expenses by as much as 73 percent. We can’t say the same of the 10th and 11th legislatures whose travel expenses increased by 56 percent.

The last four years were the most critical in terms of revenue plunge for this resource-poor island government. Prudence became the working vocabulary of the administration with intermittent hits and misses, but it finally buckled down against those who do their government work in the air. Our astute lawmakers never seem to take into serious consideration nor make it a point to understand and appreciate the financially strapped local government.

Ironic that the legislature gets to review the annual budget, yet such phenomena (major reduction in revenue generation) never sank into the nimble minds of its members. Somehow there’s the juvenile attitude that it can scold others for traveling while it exempts itself from wasteful spending of hard-earned money of struggling taxpayers.

It would be interesting to probe the records of the legislature to see who did the most travel and quiz to the hilt how taxpayers would benefit from such travel expenditure. There still are non-essentials that the NMI must repeal altogether, i.e., membership in the APIL, APPU, PBDC, APEC, South Pacific Commission, Micronesian Development Bank, among others.

If the only benefit is to the lawmaker who takes a break from a taxpayers’ paid junket trip, then money earmarked in years past for these memberships must be cut out forthwith. There’s nothing that the NMI would gain from these organizations other than the opportunity to re-echo past and vacuous commitment for mutual regional cooperation.

For instance, it would be well and good for the previous legislatures to tell taxpayers what real benefits have they gotten for their money through membership in APIL? We have put in some $100,000 into the Micronesian Development Bank for what? Perhaps it’s time too that we the taxpayers put a quota on how many travels are allowed each lawmaker per year. Other than well organized trips on tourism and defense of our rights to self-government, all other travel expenses should effectively be denied. Si Yuus Maase`!