Senate PUTC wants to summon CUC board

A meeting by the Senate Public Utilities and Transportation Committee concluded last Tuesday with an agreement to ask the Commonwealth Utilities Corp. board certain questions relating to an Office of the Public Auditor’s report and the Leidos Engineering LLC report.

PUTC chair Sen. Sixto Igisomar (R-Saipan) said the committee wishes to look further into what exactly transpired and why CUC failed to respond to an OPA request for comment on an audit report.

“I believe that we all should have the opportunity and time to review our oversight meeting and review our draft committee report so that we can put in place something that is coming from all the members,” he said.

At the committee meeting, it was questioned why CUC failed to comment on the OPA audit. According to Igisomar, it was reported to him by representatives of CUC that OPA declined a request for extension.

Since it was unclear to the committee what exactly caused CUC to miss the 30-day period given by OPA to respond to the report, the committee decided that the information was necessary to the committee’s investigation. The committee would be sending a letter to CUC to ask about this.

A separate letter would also be sent to the corporation regarding its position on the Leidos report, a federally funded review on the current energy system of the CNMI. As of publication, CUC has not clarified its stance on the report.

Leidos Engineering was commissioned to make recommendations on the type of power generation source that would be most viable for the CNMI.

“Leidos placed a lot of guidelines and recommendations—as well as the OPA report, so I hope that we can extract a lot of good information from these two reports,” Igisomar told the other committee members.