Gov. Eloy S. Inos told reporters Tuesday that the Commonwealth Utilities Corp. can overcome its problems without a receiver as proposed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The governor also considers a loan from the Marianas Public Land Trust to pay off a portion of government agencies\u2019 over $20 million debt to CUC representing unpaid utility bills, and may also tap Saipan casino developer Best Sunshine.<\/p>\n
Lawmakers who met with the governor and CUC executive director Alan Fletcher on Monday said the CNMI government will oppose EPA\u2019s request to the federal court to place some CUC projects under receivership.<\/p>\n
The governor himself said Tuesday that CUC and the CNMI government are addressing the issues that EPA asked to be placed under receivership.<\/p>\n
\u201cMost of the problems that created this thing stemmed from inadequate or poor contractor performance, which is really beyond the control of CUC, although CUC could have done more close monitoring,\u201d the governor said after signing the 2015 budget law and two other revenue-generating measures on Capital Hill.<\/p>\n
House Ways and Means Committee chair Tony Sablan (Ind-Saipan) and House Public Utilities, Transportation and Communications Committee chair Larry Deleon Guerrero (Ind-Saipan) and other lawmakers have the governor\u2019s back on the matter.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe believe that we can overcome these problems without a receiver. The receiver will cost a lot of money because the receiver basically reports to the judge and he is going to do what he feels he should do without regard to cost and the end result would be us paying for that cost so we do oppose it,\u201d Inos said.<\/p>\n
The governor said if only there are available resources, the government would appropriate money to pay off debts to CUC.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere hasn\u2019t been any appropriation simply because of the lack of resources but we\u2019re looking at ways to move cash and pay those debts down,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
He said he will communicate with MPLT \u201cif they would be willing to do this [loan] again and hopefully will provide some cash flow to CUC and pay these debts down because they are really mounting.\u201d<\/p>\n
Inos said while it is considered a loan, it is technically an \u201cadvance of the future interest income of the general fund from MPLT that\u2019s usually paid every year.\u201d<\/p>\n
The governor does not believe MPLT can accommodate the full amount of debts to CUC, at over $20 million,<\/p>\n
A portion, he said, would help, just like what it did when CUC tapped Aggreko during the years when Saipan experienced rolling blackouts.<\/p>\n
Inos said the government is in fact \u201con the last leg, last payment of some $600,000 now.\u201d<\/p>\n
The governor clarified that the CNMI cannot tap Covenant Section 702 or capital improvement project funds because the CUC debts are \u201coperational\u201d in nature.<\/p>\n
When asked whether the government can request casino developer Best Sunshine to use its planned $10 million utility vouchers for CUC residential users, Inos said they haven\u2019t initiated anything on the matter.<\/p>\n
He said the government didn\u2019t ask for the utility vouchers, but it was Best Sunshine\u2019s offer as part of their public contribution plan. Best Sunshine was granted an exclusive license to develop a $3.14-billion integrated casino resort on Saipan.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes that\u2019s one of the things that we need to talk about but Best Sunshine is looking at how their program can benefit individual residents and they want to do that through the voucher system. If we convert it to a payment of agency accounts, then their promise to the residents would not be fulfilled unless they cough up another $10 million and so forth. But we\u2019ll be happy to look at that. If that\u2019s a viable thing, we\u2019d like to get an agreement to do it but that would not help the individual residents as promised in the agreement,\u201d Inos added. (Saipan Tribune)<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Gov. Eloy S. Inos told reporters Tuesday that the Commonwealth Utilities Corp. can overcome its…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[988,26,49,244],"class_list":["post-179480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","tag-best-sunshine","tag-cnmi","tag-cuc","tag-utility"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179480","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\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179480"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179480\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}