‘A transparent govt is an honest govt’

Dear Mr. Howard Willens: I read your letter to the editor regarding your contract with the Commonwealth. I was so deeply moved that I felt compelled to respond.

In your letter, you stated, “I do not receive any compensation or salary for my professional services to the Commonwealth as special legal counsel to the governor.” Mr. Willens, your contract with the CNMI government is as special legal counsel for the Governor. You do receive a check each quarter for up to $12,000, which is $48,000 a year. No matter how you try to spin it, you are receiving compensation!

When attorneys decide to work pro bono or “for the public good,” they donate their professional services at no charge, and it is normally extended to clients who cannot afford them. If you are such a kind and caring volunteer with a “long-standing commitment to the Commonwealth” as you claim, then why are you accepting any compensation at all? Come to think of it, why didn’t you, a Yale graduate, represent the CNMI in our federalization lawsuit against the federal government? Why must we pay Jenner & Block at least $50,000 a month to represent us when we have two “volunteer” attorneys in you and your wife, Deanne Siemer? If you and Deanne represented us poor folk islanders, and you end up winning our case against the evil U.S. federal government, then you and Deanne will be hailed as hometown heroes and we will have a parade in honor of you! We, the people of the CNMI, will write songs about you and tell our grandchildren all about your good deeds (Hopefully, our grandchildren will be making at least $5 an hour in minimum wage by then).

Mr. Willens, I have five questions for you, and I hope you will volunteer some time from your busy schedule to answer them:

-Do you still honestly consider yourself a volunteer? If you do, then should we start compensating the hundreds of CNMI volunteers who clean our beaches and coach our kids? Should non-profit agencies like Marianas March Against Cancer start compensating their volunteers as well?

-When you and Governor Fitial claimed you were working for free as a volunteer at no cost to the CNMI government, don’t you think you should have at least clarified to the CNMI taxpayers who pay for your reimbursements, that you are in fact being compensated?

-Does Deanne get compensated for her time as well? Can you be upfront and honest about this please? We’d like to know, since it is coming from our pockets. Will we have to launch another lawsuit to find out if Deanne is getting any compensation, or will you come clean and just tell us?

-If you are in fact getting paid $12,000 a quarter, for up to 60 days of work per quarter while you are in the CNMI, then aren’t you really getting paid for part-time services? And if we annualize your compensation for full-time work for 365 days of the year, wouldn’t you really be making over $70,000 a year, which is more than what any of the full-time Assistant AGs make?

-With regard to your contract, what exactly are you getting paid for anyway? Your independent contractor agreement doesn’t specify any deliverables. And because you “volunteer” your legal services, you don’t submit billing statements that describe the work that you are doing in the name of the CNMI. As you said yourself in your April 27 letter to the editor, you “submit no billing statements reflecting the hours that [you] work on identified Commonwealth matters” and “[d]uring the last two months of 2008 and the first two months of 2009, [you were] working for the Commonwealth in Washington on several important matters and received no compensation of any kind.” What exactly were these “important Commonwealth matters”? If you submitted billing statements that the Attorney General’s Office would have the decency to disclose, we would know.

Mr. Willens, with all due respect, the good people of the CNMI deserve to know what is going on up at Capital Hill. A transparent government is an honest government. The fact that you tried to hold a closed-door meeting with our legislators a few months back to get their support for the federalization lawsuit tells us that you are a believer in secret wheeling and dealing. The truth is, you should have insisted that Governor Fitial hold a town hall meeting or a public forum for all the people of the CNMI, not just our legislators! And the fact that we, the unwilling plaintiffs in the governor’s and your federalization lawsuit, are now being told that we have no business knowing how much of our money is being spent and whether or not funds are being reprogrammed to pay for this lawsuit is, at the very least, insulting.

Did it ever occur to you that our community might have been more supportive of the lawsuit if you had initiated and exhausted all efforts in negotiating with the federal government? Instead, you and Governor Fitial chose to sue first and ask questions later. This is deeply regrettable, because it is a waste of valuable resources, as the $50,000 we are throwing away every month on this lawsuit could have been better spent. Things are so bad right now that the government is considering taking $400,000 from the Tobacco Control Fund, which is used to support many important public health initiatives, to keep the Division of Immigration afloat for six months! I bet the government has spent at least that much since the federalization lawsuit was filed more than eight months ago. (But we don’t know exactly how much the government has spent on this lawsuit, because you, the Governor, the Secretary of Finance, and the Attorney General’s Office refuse to tell us.)

Just like there are better things we could be spending public dollars on rather than the federalization lawsuit, surely there are better things that you could be doing with your “volunteer” time. For instance, the Office of the Public Auditor has reported millions of dollars misused and abused by public officials that could be recovered. How much has the Attorney General’s Office recovered thus far? Perhaps your volunteer time would be better spent in helping the understaffed Office of the Attorney General rather than the overstaffed Office of the Governor.

In closing, I want you to know that I am deeply disappointed in your insistence that you are still a volunteer because you don’t charge for your legal services. Mr. Willens, spin it as you may, I recall what my father told me as a young lad: “If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.”