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Rota mayor cries discrimination in tourism promotion
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Posted on Oct 17 2000
Rota Mayor Benjamin T. Manglona yesterday lamented the failure by the Marianas Visitors Authority to include the island-municipality of Rota in the itinerary of visiting travel agents from Japan.
“This oversight of denying the beautiful island of Rota the chance to meet with the travel agents from Japan is insulting and inexcusable,” he said.
In a letter to MVA Managing Director Perry Tenorio, Mr. Manglona said the tourism agency is tasked with the responsibility of promoting the inhabited islands of the Commonwealth, not just Saipan and Tinian.
“This unfortunate situation reinforces our feelings that MVA is not giving Rota much attention in their promotional activities. This discriminating practice must stop immediately,” he said.
Rota’s MVA board representative Julian S. Calvo must ensure that such unfortunate incident will not happen again, according to Mr. Manglona.
He reminded Mr. Tenorio that Rota is part of the Commonwealth and deserves to be treated fairly in connection with the MVA promotional funds.
Mr. Manglona said he fully agrees with Sen. Edward Maratita, who has sent a similar letter calling the attention of MVA on a similar issue. As a result, the local officials of Rota are asking the appropriate legislative committee to consider providing equal allocations of MVA promotional funds to the three senatorial districts.
“If this recommendation is implemented, we can be assured that Rota will receive its fair share of the CNMI and MVA promotional budget allocation,” he added. Mayor Manglona strongly recommended that the three mayors of each municipality be a non-voting member of the MVA board of directors to safeguard the interest of their respective municipalities. (LFR)
