The Senate has adopted a committee report that recommends shelving a House bill that proposes to make the Department of Public Safety commissioner a non-voting member of the Marianas Visitors Authority board.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe feel that the DPS commissioner is not needed at the MVA board. There\u2019s a proper channel of communications. MVA can always call upon DPS without the commissioner being physically there,\u201d said Senate President Joseph Mendiola in an interview.<\/p>\n
He said the DPS commissioner has far too many responsibilities already for mandatory membership in the MVA board.<\/p>\n
The Senate adopted the committee report during its session on Tinian last week.<\/p>\n
Authored by Rep. Ray Tebuteb, House Bill 15-44 aims to ensure swift police assistance on matters relating to the safety and protection of tourists. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe commissioner himself should be there to know the problems, not his deputies, not a designated person but himself, so the enforcement becomes effective,\u201d said Tebuteb earlier.<\/p>\n
He said the DPS chief\u2019s authority is most needed to curb tourism-related offenses such as theft, burglary, and vandalism of monuments and historical sites. Tebuteb cited the recently reported vandalism at the Okinawan Tower on Tinian.<\/p>\n
He said reports reaching him indicated that Japanese monuments at Banzai Cliff and Last Command Post are also being desecrated. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe need somebody in command to effect change. If the commissioner directly hears tourism woes from the affected sector, there\u2019s going to be a change,\u201d said Tebuteb. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Senate has adopted a committee report that recommends shelving a House bill that proposes to make the Department of Public Safety commissioner a non-voting member of the Marianas Visitors Authority board.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-100689","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100689","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100689"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100689\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}