The silly and apparently politically-motivated attack on the governor for the security fences at his private resident reminds me, a writer, of the importance of punctuation—and how careful the Senate, for instance, should be with its verbiage.
It reminds me, too, of the English teacher's story about the panda.
The sentence, in a text about the eating habits of pandas, originally read: "the panda eats shoots and leaves." All innocent and correct. Pandas love young bamboo shoots.
Then someone carelessly, or maliciously, dropped in a couple of commas, as follows: "the panda eats, shoots, and leaves."
One immediately gets an image of the little black-and-white bear sitting down at the restaurant for his salad, then, as the bill is presented, pulling a gun and shooting the waiter, and running away. There's a charming little book on punctuation, by Lynne Truss, entitled "Eats, Shoots & Leaves."

But back to the V.I. public-policy question: did the Territorial Senate authorize the fence (and the guardhouse) or did it not?
The governor's critics, including the Interior Department's inspector, say no. They say, and I am now quoting the Source's story of Feb. 16: the $1.3 million was "for the specific purpose of engineering design, construction, repair, or resurfacing of roads" and that the fences were not roads.
The governor replies, and has the legislative history to prove it, that the original language was: "for engineering design, construction, repair, or resurfacing of roads." The governor rightly reads the sentence as authorizing each of those four activities: designs, construction, repair, or resurfacing of roads. He says, again correctly, that "construction" covered the building of the fences and the gatehouse. There is a governmental letter on file with the Senate that makes this clear.
What nobody has pointed out is that the whole thing would be moot if the Legislature's staff had written the sentence this way:
"The Senate authorizes these moneys for: designs, construction, repair, and/or the resurfacing of roads."
Those two little dots on top of each other, the colon, make all the difference. The colon is often used just prior to a list of some kind.
The moral of this story: write carefully.