The many letters about Article 12 of the CNMI Constitution\u2014which limits land ownership to those of Northern Marianas descent\u2014have been debated in terms of \u201ceither-or\u201d: either land ownership should be allowed for those not of NMD, or it should not. However, there is another way of looking at it and talking about it\u2014by changing the definition of who it is who is allowed to own land in the CNMI.<\/p>\n
For instance, one could say that any U.S. citizen who has lived in the CNMI for several (pick a number; 2, 3, 5?) years as of 2010 would be eligible to own land. Requiring several years of residence would preclude so-called \u201cfly-by-night\u201d investors. That would open up land ownership to people of non-Marianas descent, but still provide some control over who makes the purchase.
\nThere are probably other variations on that approach that could be put forth. This one\u2014not mine, but originating from an islander\u2014is but one way of looking at it. It moves the question from \u201ceither-or\u201d\u2014which many people have found difficult to deal with\u2014to a compromise that might be more readily acceptable, and therefore more likely to succeed \u00a0in being passed\u2014both in the legislature and on the ballot.<\/p>\n
[B]Ruth L. Tighe[\/B]
\n[I]Tanapag, Saipan[\/I]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The many letters about Article 12 of the CNMI Constitution\u2014which limits land ownership to those of Northern Marianas descent\u2014have been debated in terms of \u201ceither-or\u201d: either land ownership should be allowed for those not of NMD, or it should not.<\/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-161229","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\/161229","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=161229"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161229\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=161229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=161229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=161229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}