Not incompetent, just ignorant

Referring to your article “Lang: CUC officials ignorant, incompetent” which appeared in last Friday’s issue, I was hoping that I wouldn’t be misquoted.

In your first paragraph, you stated that CUC is a government-owned company. I don’t know which of us is correct, but in my letter to the chairman of CUC, I told him that CUC is not a government agency, that it is a public corporation, and as such, it has the mandate to treat the CNMI government just like any other CUC customers.

If it sees fit to let the government get away with $11 million without disconnecting its services, then CUC should not be disconnecting the services of customers who are delinquent with much, much less than $11 million. On the other hand, CUC has the fiduciary duty to collect from the government promptly.

But what troubled me the most about your article was the paragraph when you stated that :according to him, and regulations like granting discounted power rate are illegal.” I didn’t say anything like that in my letter to Mr. Guerrero. And I would not be asking the board members to grant Tinian Dynasty a discounted rate if I knew it to be illegal, even if they had done so to the Voice of America.

The authority to set rates is with the CUC board, and I feel that the board could be flexible in setting rates. The point I was trying to convey to the board was that it should not be granting one customer a reduced rate, and then summarily denying other customer the same consideration, especially as in this case, Tinian Dynasty was very deserving.

In you article, you also mentioned that I was suggesting a 12-cent per kilowatt for Tinian Dynasty. In fact I was recommending 11 cents per kilowatt, CUC will make money from Tinian Dynasty. It is now costing CUC on Tinian 12 cents a kilowatt according to the CUC controller as a result of the recent increase in the price of fuel, but is charging residential customers only 11 cents. If Tinian Dynasty is hooked up, the cost per kilowatt will be reduced to 9-10 cents a kilowatt  in effect, Tinian Dynasty will be subsidizing the residential customers.

Finally, let me make it very clear that I didn’t characterize the board members as incompetent, but they were definitely ignorant of the CUC statue.

Froilan C. Tenorio