By Mabel Doge Luhan
I love it when someone asks me for $12.4 million dollars, and warns me that they won’t even be able to achieve anything with that money!
“[I]t will take a considerable amount of time and millions of dollars to successfully open a new market not already familiar with our product,” Chris Concepcion is quoted as saying in the Marianas Variety article “MVA says it aims to boost alternative tourism markets.” (Props to Emmanuel Erediano for correctly attributing the statement as a claim made by MVA, and not blithely printing it as fact, as almost all Variety articles would have done in the past.)
So even in the best-case scenario, where Chris achieves what he promises to achieve, it will take a lot of time and millions more dollars. Time we don’t have and millions we don’t have. In other words, Chris is warning us not to expect any results — and won’t even set a timeframe for when we can expect results. So why are we doing it? Why not spend those dollars on what we need right now — such as the Drug Court and Mental Health Court, which are in danger of being closed for lack of funds — instead of a pie-in-the-sky promise from a guy whose industry expertise extends to working as an airline check-in clerk and finding fame on the Dirty Thirty list?
Governor, and senators and senatrices, MVA won’t be the one to tell you that it’s a waste of money. They’re not the right source for evaluating this spending. MVA will tell you they want more money always, no matter what.
In the Variety’s previous MVA propaganda piece, “Tourism recovery requires major investment, MVA chair tells Senate,” we learned that “Cavanagh told the committee that ‘historically, you see a correlation between the amount of funding MVA invests and the number of visitors we receive[….] If you want to increase visitor arrivals, we need more funding.’”
In other news, you can get rich if you pay more income tax, you can lose weight if you throw away your old clothes, and you can stay healthy if you never visit doctors. The “logic” is so blatantly wrong that anyone who graduated from middle school (and doesn’t work for the Marianas Variety) should be able to identify the mistake. Yet Erediano doesn’t comment on it — does he not know, or is he scared to challenge a “ranking official?”
MVA is funded by hotel tax collections. MVA gets more money when there are more hotel tax collections. Not the other way around. (I’m assuming MVA’s two full-time statisticians have never heard of time-series analysis or ARIMA, and these are simple spot correlations done in Excel, probably not even linear regression.)
Here’s the interesting part though. Why did Ms. Cavanagh sit in front of a Senate Fiscal Affairs Committee with a completely serious face and make this claim?
There are only two possible reasons: Either Ms. Cavanagh lacks the basic knowledge and common sense we’d expect of a middle-school graduate, or she is cynically trying to pull the wool over our eyes by presenting an argument she fully knows is invalid. There are no other options.
So which is it? And in either case, why is this person in charge of a government body that’s entrusted with millions of dollars every year? (That’s not even getting to the comically obvious conflict of interest in having a hotel employee arguing for increasing government-paid marketing for hotels.)
The government body that has spent millions of dollars on “several activities in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Australia, and Singapore. These include meetings with the countries’ government officials and tour agency representatives, [and attending] trade shows, road shows and expos so we can meet with the traveling public and dialogue with regional airlines and travel agencies about expanding travel to the CNMI.” (Chris Concepcion, to Senate Committee, as quoted in “MVA says it aims to boost alternative tourism markets”)
Government officials? You do realize that in most countries, people take vacations with their own money, and are not on paid government travel when they vacation, right? Years on the MVA jet-set crew may have made it easy to forget! But outside of the CNMI and North Korea, “government officials” are not the people who decide where travelers go.
Tour agency representatives? Trade shows? Road shows? Expos? How about just cleaning up our island and spending a maximum of $100,000 a year on Instagram and TikTok influencers who can promote it? The whole project can be done with one in-house employee whose job is overseeing those influencers. There’s no need for four accountants, two statisticians, and someone paid $45,000 a year to certify tour guides, a task that, not even mentioning its ridiculousness, probably takes less than one full day of work per year.
But instead, we’re paying UltraSuperNew for a new marketing campaign. It’s called “Oh shi—” oops I mean “Shh— between you and I.” Is that theme meant to explain why there is absolutely no mention of this marketing campaign online, other than in Saipan newspapers? Is it a secret?
https://www.google.com/search?q=%E2%80%9CShh!+Between+You+%26+I%E2%80%9D
And judging from the Google results, did the UltraSuperNew crew lift the slogan from a makeup influencer? They are, after all, highly trained in fashion communications, and VJing!
The governor is on the right path in cutting the MVA’s funding to $4.4 million. But the cut doesn’t go nearly far enough. There is no reason to be spending $4.4 million of public money on free marketing for private businesses, most of them foreign-owned. Absolutely none. We could do much more for tourism by enforcing existing laws (cockfighting, unsafe driving, littering, aggressive begging), pushing for more competition and lower prices (break the HANMI cartel, encourage instead of discouraging small hotels and restaurants, legalize the “illegal” taxis, expand public transportation), and setting a $100K budget for influencers to market us.
Of course, that would mean no vacationing in Langkawi, jet-setting around Australia, partying in New Orleans, or “eyeing new markets” in Singapore. Maybe destination enhancement will become more of a priority for MVA once they have to actually be here.
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Mabel Doge Luhan is a woman of loose morals. She resides in Kagman V, where she pursues her passions of crocheting, beatboxing, and falconry.
