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Charlotte Amalie
Thursday, March 28, 2024
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All Talk, No Action

Dear Source:

Wapa electrical prices through the roof and some…and now an 11% rate increase is needed for water rates.
The costs of gas is still up; food prices rising steadily (and the flooding in the mid-west hasn't really been felt yet) as if they weren't ridiculously high before esp. on St. John; restaurants are trying to figure out how to stay in business between perishable pricing and gas as these increased rates are slamming them hard. Someone like me with no kids to feed or rent to pay responds by staying home a lot due to the cost of gas and meals out-and not spending any money in preparation for the St. John property tax issue and it's impact. What happens to those single parents in poverty with three jobs to barely stay alive?
Add to that picture the news on Wall Street stateside with big money Companies being bailed out as a last resort by the US Government.
There is a financial crisis, like few we have seen before, ahead of us.
When will we in our Virgin Islands understand that we can no longer throw money at problems like Wapa?
What we need to do is accept that the way we manage our VI Government must change! What do we have to do? The first thing is honestly look at our unnecessary bureaucracies. There are too many people in upper management managing the next level of Managers-and the list goes on. This has created a big Monster that is gobbling up our resources and money-leaving nothing for the services that it was initially created for.
Case in point our Youth Recreational needs.
I sat in a Legislative hearing in attempts to get funding for St. John Youth's Housing and Recreation in the spring. What has been done for the youth of St. John is abysmal. I looked around that room and counted 5 Gentlemen in the room-all from Parks and Recreation-with suits on ready to address these concerns. To this day no funding has come through and the paperwork seems to have been "lost on someone's desk".
Let's remember we have only 115,000.00 people in the entire VI's; now look at the amounts of monies that go to supporting our Government! Are we blind to this issue of bad spending?
We saw that in way the VIWMA was created. Just go to that website and see the amount of Managers. We need more people setting up recycling, reducing and Reusing programs-instead we have many Managers talking about how to solve problems. Sound familiar?
We do the same in our legislative branch…talk, talk, talk and very little money to the needs.
Can we not get down to basics…define our needs and find a way to more simply have those working directly with at the grass roots level of needs deliveries-do what needs to be done?
I get that many people in Government do not want to lose their jobs. That is understandable. The question to you is: Do you care more about our Islands and it's many very serious problems …or the Position you have? (I just bet many of you even dislike your job immensely–how can you feel good about a job that does so little good for people?)
We need a major overhaul in our Government from the number of Senators to the need for localized representation of issues and solutions.
We can get creative and deal with this issue by thinking outside the box in creating positions in areas that we do need resources in. Those that do not want to be a part of the much needed solutions and fight this change must be given other alternatives.
We have a cancer of sorts in the dysfunctional bureaucracies we have created and maintained for years now in the VI's.
We need treatment. We can keep denying it or accept the fact that we must make some hard decisions and change.
Will our Nov. election candidates be brave enough to talk about this?
With the state of economics in The Mainland-we better accept that the usual bail-outs just might not be there! (This is healthy as we misuse many of our bailouts and they tend to keep us from cleaning up our messes!)
Governor de Jongh has major challenges here; he didn't create this mult-layered bureaucratic dysfunctional monster but my bet is that as a businessman he is often, exhausted, in fighting a monster that is threatening to eat us all up in the VI's.
Bonny Corbeil
St. John

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