Commonwealth Utilities Corp. board of directors vice chair Eric San Nicolas declined to respond to allegations that a recent policy change at CUC was intended to benefit himself, while emphasizing that he won\u2019t tolerate CUC personnel divulging customers\u2019 account information.
\nThe issue stems from the new promissory note policy that he proposed and was ultimately approved by a 4-1 vote by the board during their special meeting last month. The new policy now authorizes the Tinian and Rota deputy directors to approve promissory notes for the islands.
\nSan Nicolas, who is from Tinian, allegedly owes CUC in unpaid accounts but he declined to comment on this, instead voicing his concern for CUC employees who may be divulging customer information.<\/p>\n
\u201cI am not going to comment on amounts or whatever like that, but if that\u2019s a common practice in CUC [divulging customer information], you better rest assured that I\u2019m going to get to the bottom to make sure that\u2019s addressed,\u201d San Nicolas told Saipan Tribune. \u201cI will not tolerate CUC employees divulging personal account information about me as a customer.\u201d<\/p>\n
San Nicolas reiterated that the new policy for promissory notes was intended to empower the deputy directors on Tinian and Rota and to better serve the islands\u2019 residents. He also clarified that customer service managers on Saipan still have the authority for promissory notes but only for Saipan.
\n\u201cDecentralizing certain things in CUC is good for the municipalities because each of the deputy directors down there on Tinian and Rota, they know the people,\u201d San Nicolas. \u201cWhy have deputy directors if you can\u2019t entrust them with that responsibility?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cEven if I\u2019m a customer involved in that same line, so what? I\u2019m a customer,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
San Nicolas said he is going to push for more decentralization in CUC as well as look at the disparity in salaries of CUC employees on the three islands.
\n\u201cI was appointed to the CUC board of directors to protect the interest of the ratepayers [on] Tinian,\u201d he said. \u201cIf I\u2019m going to get criticized and labeled as corrupt for doing that, so be it.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIf empowering deputy directors on Tinian with the authority that they should have in the beginning is corrupt, then yeah, I\u2019m corrupt,\u201d San Nicolas said. \u201cIf listening to my residents on Tinian and listening to their call because one head of household who works minimum wage cannot pay their bill and then after 60 days they get cut off unless they pay 100 percent and they have to sacrifice between food and power, if that is corrupt, then I am corrupt.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Commonwealth Utilities Corp. board of directors vice chair Eric San Nicolas declined to respond to…<\/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":[49,1421,50,38],"class_list":["post-216234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","tag-cuc","tag-eric-san-nicolas","tag-power","tag-saipan-tribune"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216234","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=216234"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216234\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=216234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=216234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=216234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}