SAIPAN — Hours after voting for the $40 million borrowing bill he once threatened to fight in court, Representative Vincent R. Aldan said the amendment adopted Saturday guarantees the Legislature will review any CUC financing contract before it is signed.
“You can’t have your cake and eat it at the same time,” Aldan said in a phone interview with NMI News Service following the House’s 20-0 vote. “At least I know that the amendment that we did place in there is pretty much an oversight, that no agreement or contract can be signed without notifying us first.”
Aldan said the notice requirement gives lawmakers a window to act on anything in a financing package they find improper. “They got to bring the contract first so we can review prior to anybody signing it,” he said. If a lender agreement tried to pledge customer security deposits as collateral, he said, “we can yank that out.”
He said the deposit protections he demanded last week did not need to be written into the bill because they already exist in law, with deposits required to sit in an interest-earning trust fund. “It’s not even our money to touch it to begin with or to pledge it to anything,” he said.
Aldan, the House Transportation and Infrastructure chairman who spent decades working in utilities, said his vote came at a cost. “I made it with a heavy heart,” he said. “Just because it’s mismanaged, that doesn’t mean that we’re gonna leave 5,000 people without water or power.”
He offered an apology to residents who will carry the debt. “I’m sorry to the people. I just had to,” he said. “I cannot afford to see four or five thousand people without the basic necessities of life.”
Aldan said his next fights are an independent audit and a professional appraisal of CUC’s assets, pointing to his measure requiring an asset evaluation that he said has sat in the Senate since spring. A proper appraisal, he said, would let CUC pledge its own assets as collateral instead of ever raising customer deposits in a lending negotiation, and he said he would not trust a valuation that does not come from a certified utility appraiser. He also said he wants CUC’s finances published on a public dashboard on the corporation’s website showing where every dollar goes.
Asked about the Watson memo cutting restoration crews to weekday hours for lack of funds, Aldan said the financing answers the funding question but not the oversight one. “Now you do,” he said of CUC having money. “You just got to go out there and try to figure it out. But we want to see that contract before you sign it.”
Aldan said FEMA reimbursements, insurance proceeds and grants received by CUC would go first to paying down the debt.
He plans to be in the gallery when the Senate takes up the bill Monday. “I’m gonna be all up in it,” he said. “I ran because of the utility and I will not let the people down.”
