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‘Legislature partly to blame for MPLA mess’
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Posted on Feb 12 2006
The Legislature is partly to blame for the current problems with the Marianas Public Lands Authority, according to a top official of the Marianas Public Land Trust.
MPLT chairman Juan S. Torres said that the lawmakers would have found out about MPLA’s spending practice if they took the time to read the agency’s annual financial statements.
“If problems were addressed by the Legislature by reading the financial statements, we wouldn’t have been trying to abolish MPLA. The financial problems could have shown where MPLA was taking the public’s money. By large, I kind of blame the Legislature for not conducting an oversight and making adjustments to correct the system,” Torres said in Friday morning’s public hearing regarding bills that would abolish MPLA.
The chairman of the MPLT Board of Trustees expressed opposition to the proposed action against MPLA.
“I believe that we should give MPLA time to fix itself,” Torres said.
He further maintained that frequent changes in the law could hurt the Commonwealth’s efforts to attract investors.
“We have a tendency to change laws every now and then. At the whim of few people, we change the law. It’s a mark of political immaturity and instability,” he added.
MPLA’s precursor, the former Marianas Public Lands Corporation, was created in 1978. MPLC was abolished by Executive Order 94-3 in 1994, during the administration of then Gov. Froilan C. Tenorio, and replaced by MPLA.
House Bill 15-57 and its counterpart Senate Bill 15-33 seek to repeal Executive Order 94-3 to abolish MPLA and create a department of public lands.
