Over the last 37 years I have watched the CNMI develop from that small, laid-back piece of the Trust Territory into a lumbering giant amongst Pacific islands during the \u201990s and for a while after 2000. History now tells us that our aspirations were misguided, fueled by the fervor of a few for quick wealth, greed and power. It has served those few well, but has it served you?<\/p>\n
Since 1995, the CNMI was led into a snowstorm of corruption, conspiracy, mal-intent and all fostered by a sense of isolation, world events sometimes seen as directed solely against the CNMI, and leadership that consistently fell far short of reading what was written so clearly on the walls of disaster, having donned the blinders to reality during the \u201cgood ol\u2019 times.\u201d Some erudite individuals tried sounding warnings not dissimilar to the midnight ride of Paul Revere, but they were discounted, along with countless offerings and well-intended suggestions\u2014mostly having come from \u201coutsiders,\u201d myself included.<\/p>\n
So much for the disdain of outside personalities. After all, hadn\u2019t the CNMI suffered hundreds of years under \u201cforeigners?\u201d But, now this once powerful and energetic island base is sliding rapidly down the slippery slope of collapse and led by so-called leaders who had managed to make a lifetime job out of politics and, blinded by their own sense of aggrandizement, no longer were able to heed or even hear the cries of their beleaguered people. People and businesses now taxed to death, some forced to leave their homeland to survive, have become so disconnected from current leadership that words of disparagement are flung at one another relentlessly\u2014some on the pages of this periodical.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s time to stop! This ship of a nation needs a new rudder, a new captain, a new crew. Some current elected officials are just now waking up to the new reality\u2014a very bleak one at that\u2014and doing\u2026nothing! Well, almost nothing if you consider casino, open zoning, midnight massages, and marijuana as magic bullets. They are now seeing the exodus\u2014and Moses is nowhere in sight. Unless changes are made, here are what I feel are some of the things the CNMI can look forward to over the next 10 years:<\/p>\n
Continued decreasing budgets as the Legislature plods relentlessly toward more and more \u201crevenue sources\u201d (now known as \u201ctaxes\u201d) to perpetuate the bloated system while blindly believing in the tooth fairy (casino) and plunging headlong after more greedy \u201cfree\u201d money, somehow having convinced themselves that the fairy godmother will descend and bestow their every desire; continued departure of business and people as earning a living wage no longer exists; a failed infrastructure as power generation flounders with its ever attendant water, sewage, etc. <\/p>\n
We can point fingers at the rest of the world, as we have for the last few years, or at each other. We can \u201cblame\u201d air carriers, SARS, federalization, oil, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny\u2014but what has been or will be accomplished with this?<\/p>\n
Or we can decide to stand, brush off and take the steps needed\u2014and one of those steps is to clear ourselves of certain ingrained myths and the rationale behind \u201cfamilial\u201d politics. Since the end of the Trust Territory days, I have not been witness to a single stranger coming into this land with the intent to harm it or any of its people. In fact, there have been countless \u201coutsiders\u201d who came here, contributed, and fell in love with the place and its people. Many have left, many will stay and all will help if given the chance. I\u2019m not speaking of the small, criminal element that has recently manifested and taken advantage of our untenable situation\u2014but can be eliminated.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s speak briefly about the one thing that, in my view, will be the key to regenerating the CNMI: power, and I don\u2019t mean government. First, we have already been warned by officers at CUC that their engines won\u2019t last but about five to seven years more\u2014a dire warning indeed, yet has any government official acknowledged it? Have there been any plans afoot to cope with such a collapse? Even if CUC\u2019s 30- to 40-year-old engines could be nursed along for another 10 years, here\u2019s what you face: Ever increasing maintenance costs, replacement parts that may or may not be available, frequent outages and disruptions, inability to service all users and rolling blackouts as production wanes or varies, ever more pernicious EPA oversight and ever increasing costs to the consumer, especially if the price of diesel continues to rise, as is likely. A co-operative or receivership is not the answer.<\/p>\n
And what will CUC cost you? Currently operating on a $120 million or so annual budget, bolstered with higher than needed consumer billings because the government itself must be subsidized for failure to pay its own bill, and not including any cost increases, CUC will gobble up over $1.2 billion over the 10 years and you will pay ever increasing household bills, now pegged at around 40 cents per KwH and indelibly headed for 45 or even 50 cents per KwH as the consumer base depletes.<\/p>\n
What is the government proposing? Well, nothing really. They opine of great solar arrays or huge wind farms and tapping unknown volcanic sources for geothermal power or the ocean\u2019s tides (while enacting additional taxes on \u201cgreen\u201d appliances). These so-called \u201calternative\u201d power sources, consistently limited by local pundits as \u201csolar, wind, bio-mass (ugh!) and geothermal,\u201d have been touted as the \u201canswer,\u201d mostly by high-pitched sales people of unknown repute who would have you believe \u201cthey\u201d and \u201cthey\u201d alone have the magic bullet\u2014and a \u201cclean, green\u201d one at that! Well, dream on (as they say); it ain\u2019t gonna happen, at least not here. <\/p>\n
The costs of such impositions are outrageous, the true environmental impact is being hidden from you, government subsidies are the norm in current installations\u2014and not a single one of them has yet to match or fall below the cost of diesel (all factors considered). They are touted as \u201cgreen\u201d but are they? Several times in letters to the editor, I have explained the \u201cgreen\u201d footprint of these industries\u2014and they are not what you have been led to believe. Truly, the wind and the sun are not free power for one and all! (Caveat: individual, private, supplemental units are a viable use of wind and solar, so why is our government not supporting such?)<\/p>\n
A well-respected former educator, Roger Mr. Ludwick, has touched upon a new technology\u2014a safe, cheap source of power, albeit a controversial one simply because for two generations we have been guided (more often, mis-guided) by the complexities of the nuclear phenomenon. Currently invested nuclear plants have shown us their power\u2014to destroy and, as is the wont of most, to believe the worst is ingrained. Now, we have a newer version and, to some, it is difficult to envision that an industry we already loathe can somehow become our benefactor, having cured the problems so often displayed in the past. I\u2019ve already spoken in previous letters about the safety of new Small, Passive, Modular Reactors (SPMRs) that are just on the horizon and could be in service (here) in two to four years. Doubters linger but the research is clear and will be proven soon.<\/p>\n
Compare the cost: A fully functional SPMR generating 27 MW of power could be had for the mere sum of about $30 million. It would sit on a half-acre of land and appear as nothing more than a two-story, four-bedroom home. It would use no external resources such as water or chemicals. There would be no emissions of any kind, making its \u201cgreen\u201d footprint smaller than any other source of power. The 10-year cost of installing and operating two of these plants would be about $90 million (compare this to CUC at $1.2 billion). Refueling would occur at 10-year intervals and no waste (the expended fuel source) would ever be kept on site. Final cost to the consumer would be about 8 to 10 cents per KwH for the first five years, as construction cost is amortized by its private owner\/operator, and 5 to 7 cents per KwH after that (including \u00bd cent per KwH for cost of the next fuel module). <\/p>\n
That final residential or business bill alone would draw investors like flies to honey\u2014and our displaced people could come home. There are additional benefits such as production of hydrogen gas and desalinization of ocean water. With hydrogen as a ready and cheap gas, we could convert nearly all modes of transportation on island to this power source, whose only emission would be water\u2014not the deadly, toxic exhaust of gasoline. Both Honda and Mercedes are currently manufacturing such vehicles.<\/p>\n
By the way, gasoline is now, what, about $4.75 a gallon? The hydrogen produced by added modules on the SPMR plant would cost, if compared as an equivalent to gasoline, about 40 cents per gallon\u2014and the mileage is better too!<\/p>\n
I think it\u2019s time to work together, to cast off the myth that outsiders are here to somehow destroy the indigenous and its vibrant culture, to have a little trust in one another and to actually become a viable part of the American family\u2014instead of begging handouts, then yelling hands off.<\/p>\n
[B]Dr. Thomas D. Arkle Jr. [\/B]
\n[I]Winter Haven, Florida[\/I]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Over the last 37 years I have watched the CNMI develop from that small, laid-back piece of the Trust Territory into a lumbering giant amongst Pacific islands during the \u201990s and for a while after 2000. History now tells us that our aspirations were misguided, fueled by the fervor of a few for quick wealth, greed and power. It has served those few well, but has it served you?<\/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-153410","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\/153410","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=153410"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153410\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=153410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=153410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=153410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}