Commonwealth Utilities Corp. executive director Alan Fletcher said that CUC intends to address in today\u2019s court hearing the U.S Department of Justice\u2019s filings that contain \u201cnumerous inaccuracies or left out relevant facts.\u201d<\/p>\n
According to Fletcher, CUC previously filed an extensive update to the court on July 17, 2014, providing information and updates on the pipeline and Tank 102 projects.<\/p>\n
\u201cHowever, on Friday, July 25, the day before I was to travel to California, the U.S Department of Justice filed a set of documents totaling 97 pages. These filings included multiple declarations by Environmental Protection Agency technical personnel on a far range of projects that CUC has, and is addressing, under the stipulated orders,\u201d Fletcher said.<\/p>\n
He said the filings from DOJ \u201cvastly expands\u201d the matter beyond the pipeline and tank 102 projects.<\/p>\n
According to Fletcher, the filings were made after DOJ was put on notice that CUC would have to travel to a status conference in California and with less than \u201cone business day to respond.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fletcher told Saipan Tribune that CUC\u2019s technical staff worked through the weekend putting together individual declarations and formal responses to the court.<\/p>\n
\u201cMyself and CUC\u2019s legal counsel James Sirok will be working on these responses right up to the court hearing,\u201d Fletcher said.<\/p>\n
He said that acting attorney general Gil Birnbrich will be attending on behalf of the CNMI government and will be the one coordinating their responses.<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel these filings have prejudiced the utility and thrown it off balance with competing demands as it attempts to address the actual issues requested by the court,\u201d Fletcher said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn addition, the nature of the filing is not appropriate against our struggling public utility which is doing its best to marshal its limited resources for the good of its customers,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
Among the issues raised by DOJ in its July 25 filing was the lack certified operators for the water and wastewater operations.<\/p>\n
According to CUC\u2019s quarterly report for stipulated order no. 1, many of its direct responsible charge or DRC operators left CUC in late February 2013 and CUC is recruiting by using in-house promotion for qualified operators.<\/p>\n
\u201cCUC now has 21 certified staff and hopes to fill these and future positions with local staff,\u201d CUC stated.<\/p>\n
DOJ also claims that CUC continues to have meter failures. CUC states that it has completed a \u201c98.5 percent metered system-wide\u201d and that CUC has the ability to identify and change out failed meters but \u201cthere is limited funding available to purchase additional meter stocks.\u201d<\/p>\n
CUC stated that it continues to struggle financially, due to the struggling economy and government debt totaling $25 million in unpaid utility bills. <\/p>\n
\u201cCUC has no working capital and no reserves to ride out long periods of non-payment, which results in underfunded operations, such as deferred maintenance, lack of supplies for typhoon readiness, and lack of monies for capital improvements and stipulated order projects,\u201d CUC stated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Commonwealth Utilities Corp. executive director Alan Fletcher said that CUC intends to address in today\u2019s…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[49,293,122,244],"class_list":["post-43578","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","tag-cuc","tag-doj","tag-travel","tag-utility"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43578","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\/45"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43578"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43578\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43578"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43578"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43578"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}