Commonwealth Development Authority board chair Tom Glenn Quitugua expressed his support for the proposed relocation of Garapan Elementary School to give way to the economic development in the area.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe place is at the heart of Garapan and it\u2019s ideal as a business district. The school has to be constructed in a new site, a more suitable area, away from the business district,\u201d said Quitugua.<\/p>\n
The board chairman, who is also a member of the Northern Marianas Housing Corp. board, said that he has always supported the idea of converting the Garapan school\u2019s lot into a high-end residential area or a commercial or entertainment center.<\/p>\n
\u201cI call it urban revitalization. We need to focus on revitalizing the business area to boost economic development,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The outgoing Babauta administration proposes to relocate the school to Navy Hill, and transform the area into a business center.<\/p>\n
The Public School System said it has yet to thoroughly review the proposal.<\/p>\n
Earlier, Saipan Chamber of Commerce outgoing president Alex Sablan favored the conversion of the Garapan area into a full-blown commercial district. Sablan said this is needed to be able to create more attractions for tourists.<\/p>\n
He said that, besides the beach and island tours, Saipan needs to have malls, convention centers, and other facilities to offer tourists while they are here.<\/p>\n
The CNMI is experiencing a decline in tourist arrivals, especially from Japan\u2014its major tourism market\u2014due to the recent pullout of Japan Airlines.<\/p>\n
JAL used to bring in some 150,000 tourists to the CNMI annually.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Commonwealth Development Authority board chair Tom Glenn Quitugua expressed his support for the proposed relocation of Garapan Elementary School to give way to the economic development in the area.<\/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-96657","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\/96657","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=96657"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96657\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}