Dear Source,
With the WAPA sale there seems to be a bad case of "the Emperor has no clothes."
We are selling the plant but keeping the lines. This is sheer madness. Any sale of WAPA should, must, be conditional on putting the lines underground. Does the Government know how much tax revenue it lost after Hugo and after Marilyn?
Does the Government know or care how much the economy and the people suffered after those hurricanes until the power came back on?
We lost as a community more than the amount the Government will gain from the sale.
What will the Government gain with $300 million? Three hundred days more before having to face reality? We are now obligated to spend a million dollars a day to keep up with debt payments and government salaries and other more wasteful cost in cars, office machinery and misuse of cellular phones.
Getting our power lines underground is vital regardless of sale or no sale. Any sale without that necessary condition is a sellout of the people of the Virgin Islands.
Michael Paiewonsky
