Guam’s airport needs to hire Carl Gutierrez for a day

Good grief, how long is it going to take for the Guam International Airport Authority to tile its baggage claims and immigration areas? It’s been more than a year since the airport ripped up the flooring there, and there’s been no progress to its rehabilitation. Hundreds of thousands of tourists have seen that dump, giving them their first glimpse into how dysfunctional the island’s government can be.

And it’s not like the solution requires feats of engineering or design. Someone has to go in, measure the floor, then put tiles or carpet on it.

Is someone at the airport holding out for their favorite color to come into stock? Did the first three orders of tiles fall off a container on its passage through the Pacific Ocean?

Or is someone on the board just waiting for their favorite contractor to qualify to bid?

Whatever the lame excuse the airport has, I have a solution.

Hire GVB president and CEO Carl Gutierrez for one day and let him be in charge of fixing that one project.

Some people may not like how Mr. Gutierrez got things done when he was the governor, but no reasonable person can deny that that man got things done. Tales of his leadership – and residual questions about it – form around a man who would go straight into the poorest neighborhoods giving out orders to several agency heads to install street lights, connect water pipes to homes, pave roads, and feed people.

When I used to go running – okay, walking – in Tumon, I texted him at night about a slippery portion of the sidewalk at Pleasure Island. At 6:30 a.m. the next day, he sent me a picture of an employee water blasting that area with a note that he directed his people to repaint areas.

While the rest of the government was screwing up the Mawar response, there was Carl Gutierrez and his employees at GVB on bucket trucks fixing things, repainting surfaces, cleaning up Tumon, and bringing an urgency to recovery that assured our markets that Guam was back open for business.

The guy just knows how to get things done. Granted, he’s not one to spend his time on the paperwork needed to back everything up; but, hey, that’s what staff is for, right?

Put Gutierrez in charge of these simple projects at the airport. Get him a staff that will dot the “i”s and cross the “t”s. The tiling of the baggage claim and immigration areas doesn’t belong in a catalog about the Seven Wonders of the World.