The Democratic Party is opposing Gov. Eloy S. Inos\u2019 tentative proposal to take funds from the Marianas Public Land Trust to pay the central government\u2019s debt with the Commonwealth Utilities Corp., saying that MPLT funds are reserved specifically for the direct use of native Northern Marianas descent and not for those who are non-NMDs.<\/p>\n
In a statement over the weekend, the party noted that previous and present administrations have continued to fail in their attempts to maintain and rehabilitate the Commonwealth\u2019s power system. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe have gone through one emergency operations after another for a decade and now the governor wants NMDs to shoulder the weight of paying for the government\u2019s failure when the debt is owed by every voting citizen and business that uses power,\u201d the statement said.<\/p>\n
The party believes that the native rights and the funds of NMDs should be respected. \u201cWe are sure no one would ask the Native Americans to pay a federal debt. But if the governor applies these funds to a government debt, it will be beyond the obligations of the trust to help locals\u2014a clear violation of the trust\u2019s intentions.\u201d <\/p>\n
The Democratic Party statement insists that the central government\u2019s debt with CUC is a debt for the entire CNMI\u2014all its citizens and all businesses\u2014not just the NMDs. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe saw this same kind of money grabbing behavior with the retirees\u2019 money and now the [Retirement] Fund is broke and dying. The governor\u2019s plan to take money from MPLT really takes away the future funding meant to help NMDs improve their quality of life and the CNMI. MPLT was established to help the native locals, not pay government debt, especially when there is no collateral or credible plan for repayment. We view the governor\u2019s attempt to get money from MPLT as nothing more than a repeat of the same robbery scenarios that killed the Retirement Fund.\u201d<\/p>\n
The statement points out that present and previous administration have allowed the CNMI to become a victim of one federal takeover after another: wages, immigration and CW citizenship, the Retirement Fund, and now CUC facing receivership. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe present administration continues to be a clear and present danger to the local people, with behavior that is more tyrannical than democratic and responsible government. The Democratic Party is offering genuine alternatives and we are confident that voters do not condone what the present administration has done and what they plan to do,\u201d the statement ends. (Saipan Tribune)<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Democratic Party is opposing Gov. Eloy S. Inos\u2019 tentative proposal to take funds from…<\/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":[26,161,917,134],"class_list":["post-179834","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","tag-cnmi","tag-mplt","tag-nmds","tag-retirement-fund"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179834","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=179834"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179834\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179834"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179834"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179834"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}