Cut off the spoiled brat, and let the governor reform how Saipan brings the tourists back

Remember that time your parents punished you for doing something wrong and you were mad but then you didn’t make a mess of your life and later on you were grateful for it? You might have called their intervention a ‘blessing in disguise.’

Here are more adages we can apply to the news that the Commonwealth House of Representatives is authorizing Marianas Visitors Authority $2.7 million in public funds for its Fiscal Year 2025 operations (nearly $10 million less than its request): Is the glass half full, or half empty?

If you read the Saipan Tribune’s shill of a story unsurprisingly advocating for public funds to benefit its parent company’s hotel operations, you might either believe the House emptied 11/12 of the MVA budget, or the calculator at the newsroom is broken. Based on the headline alone – “MVA: $2.6M appropriated budget inadequate” – the proverbial half-empty people might sense doom.

I see reset and opportunity.

Remember that time those Marianas Visitors Authority people said they were the experts in tourism because they’re the business people who know how things work?

Now’s the perfect time for them to put all that business experience to work for the public. Because in business, the decision makers have no choice but to face financial realities. If you want to do things that will cost $100, but you only get $20 to do it, there’s no debating the difference. Praising the gods of the Chinese Communist Party, sending photos and propaganda of your government-paid vacation to Langkawi and Australia, and flashing your “expertise” in business won’t make $80 suddenly appear.

In business, the businesses that will survive are the ones that scrap the $100 plan, dig deep into their gray matter, and do something completely different with the $20 in hand.

If MVA hasn’t already taken Kandit columnist Mabel Doge Luhan’s advice on how it should operate moving forward in order to bring tourists in, I suggest they get to it.

In fact, I don’t think the Commonwealth government should trust those myopic and highly conflicted MVA board members and management to inaugurate the major reform needed in the publicly funded tourist-attracting arena. After all, MVA for so many years now has gotten away with squandering tens of millions of dollars every year – not with the goal of increasing visitors arrivals – to provide free advertising for the cabal of hotels that control the MVA board and have been proxies – even unwittingly – for the CCP.

For the next two years, the legislature should abolish MVA, transfer the function of marketing the CNMI to source markets to the governor, and let Arnold Palacios directly supervise a very small but qualified and creative staff to direct marketing activities.

The CNMI House is doing its job, which is to force government agencies like MVA to live within the means the public provides through taxes. Chris Concepcion and Gloria Cavanagh can complain and whine until the fantasized federal indictment of Ralph Torres, but it ain’t gonna make an additional $10 million appear out of thin air. Maybe they should have opened their mouths when the former governor was throwing hundreds of millions of dollars in federal pandemic funds to his cronies. Ironically, tens of millions of those squandered monies went to many of the hotels represented on the MVA board and the Hotel Association of the NMI.

And even if there were an additional $10 million that could be ponied up somewhere, why should MVA get that money when 1) it has failed the tourism economy for years already, and 2) so many crucial priorities of the government are taking a hit from the Torres-caused financial crisis and are struggling to live within means?

Ms. Luhan is absolutely right, column after column: Find the right influencers in Japan and Korea, and pay them to promote the CNMI. Hire a reputable advertising firm in Japan and Korea, and let them do their magic. Have the Department of Public Works collaborate with the grants office on a plan to fund destination enhancement projects throughout Saipan, Tinian, and Rota. Go back to branding destination CNMI as a Saipan paradise, the name people in Japan and Korea actually are familiar with.

Fire the current advertising agencies. Let go of whatever offices the CNMI public pays for in Japan and Korea and wherever else MVA blows your money. Abolish MVA.

It has failed, and it has failed to recognize opportunity amid decline.

In 2012, then-Guam Governor Eddie Calvo did what governors in the Marianas have never done. After he had transferred about $300 million in current liabilities (a deficit made primarily of tax refunds owed to tens of thousands over an average of four years) to long term debt (bonds), and had stabilized the government’s finances, he wanted to harden the government’s fiscal position. He introduced a bill in the legislature to authorize a series of spending cuts.

Had the legislature accepted this political gift from a governor willing to take the hits for the reduction in force and some pay that would have ensued, Guam’s government would be in a substantially better financial position today. Instead, senators misplaced their balls as soon as the first person complained at the bill’s public hearing.

So government kept growing. You know what saved GovGuam? The pandemic. And unlike Ralph Torres, Lou Leon Guerrero didn’t squander all the money in two years!

The CNMI has an opportunity to modernize and make efficient how the government uses public resources to market Saipan, Tinian, and Rota to people in Japan and Korea looking for a vacation in America. The House threw down the gauntlet with MVA, just as a parent might reality check a child straying off the right path. By the reaction of MVA’s leaders, all I’m seeing is a child throwing himself on the floor kicking and screaming and flailing his arms like a spoiled brat.

That says something, and I hope the governor and the legislature see it. Let’s see how committed the government is to making the right changes.