SAIPAN — Representative Vincent R. Aldan has pushed back on the Senate’s defense of its handling of utility legislation, arguing that careful review becomes delay when the public is given no written reasons, no timeline and no date certain for action on ratepayer-protection bills.
In a public statement Tuesday responding to Senate Public Utilities, Transportation and Communications Committee Chairman Manny Gregory Tenorio Castro, Aldan said no one is asking the Senate to rubber-stamp House bills, but that the chamber owes the public accountability for why several measures have stalled.
“No one is asking the Senate to be a rubber stamp,” Aldan said. “We are asking the Senate to be accountable.”
Aldan, who chairs the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, said Castro was correct that the Senate is a co-equal body with a duty to review bills carefully, but that the point did not answer why ratepayer-protection and utility-accountability bills have been held without clear reasons, written findings, a date for action or published committee amendments. Due diligence is not obstruction when it is active, transparent and documented, he said, but legislation that sits without explanation invites the public to call it a delay.
He laid out what he said real due diligence should produce: the specific reason each bill was tabled or held, the agencies or stakeholders requesting delay, written legal or fiscal concerns, a public hearing schedule, proposed amendments and a date certain for reconsideration. If those exist, Aldan said, the committee should release them, and if they do not, the Senate is defending delay rather than diligence.
Aldan also rejected the framing that public criticism amounts to bullying or social media attacks, saying that asking for reasons, timelines and accountability is not an attack but democracy, and that oversight applies in both directions. He said CUC’s problems are not theoretical, pointing to billing, arrears, fuel-adjustment costs, procurement, audits and reliability, and warned that the longer reform bills sit, the longer ratepayers remain exposed.
The exchange is the latest in a back-and-forth over utility legislation. Aldan earlier accused the Senate of stalling his bills, Senator Corina L. Magofna said she tabled a billing measure to add consumer protections, and Castro defended the Senate’s review process in a statement saying the chamber is not a rubber stamp. Two of Aldan’s measures, House Bill 24-87 and House Bill 24-88, which seek independent valuation and a third-party audit of CUC, remain unassigned in the Senate after passing the House in March.
