V.I. residents who listened through a three-hour-plus forum Tuesday featuring 11 candidates for Senate were rewarded with an evening packed with content and ideas.
Tuesday’s "2010 Senate Showdown," sponsored by the St. Croix Chamber of Commerce in conjunction with JKC Communications, featured half the field running for Senate from St. Croix. Because there are 24 candidates seeking the seven seats from the big island, the field was randomly divided into four panels. The first two panels took their turn before the audience Tuesday, and the remainder of the candidates, plus the candidates for senator at large, will go through their paces Thursday. The event is being held at the conference room of the V.I. Cardiac Center at the Juan Luis Hospital.
According to Michael Dembeck, executive director of the chamber, the questions were submitted by members and honed to make it hard for the candidates to hide in vagaries. And while the candidates didn’t differ much on most of the issues, they did present a range of ideas for dealing with the territory’s problems and opportunities.
For instance, when candidates were asked what energy sources should be considered by WAPA for replacing expensive petroleum, the usual alternatives that islanders have become used to hearing—such as solar, wind and tide—were all mentioned, but so were coal, geothermal and liquified natural gas. And all candidates said they would support the proposed Alpine Energy trash-to-energy project proposed for St. Croix if the application no longer contains pet coke as a potential fuel.
Or, when asked how they propose to lower the territory’s budget, which is about 90 percent personnel costs, Sen. Wayne James cautioned that slashing the budget is not necessarily a good idea, because the territory’s economy is dependent on those government jobs.
"It’s easy at this time of year [election season] to talk about cutting the government, but you have to remember that the largest industry in the Virgin Islands is government," he said. "In this community you rely on the government payroll. People plan cake sales and car washes around the government pay day."
And on the same subject, former Sen. James Weber said the best way to reduce government spending is to "have the private sector produce better jobs so that government is not the place where people want to work."
Speaking Tuesday in panel A were James, Myron Allick, Judi Fricks, former Sen. Norman Jn Baptiste, Lee Seward and Sen. Sammuel Sanes.
Speaking in the second panel were Weber, Diane Capehart, Sen. Nellie Rivera-O’Reilly, Wayne Petersen and Sen. Michael Thurland.
Candidate Michael Springer was scheduled to take part Tuesday but did not appear.
None of the 11 candidates said they would support the proposed V.I. constitution without amendments, and all except Thurland expressed willingness to consider replacing the gross receipts tax or excise tax with a value-added tax or a sales tax, although Weber cautioned that residents are wary of a sales tax and a serious education program would be required to get them to accept it.
The candidates Tuesday also all supported allowing charter schools in the territory and extending both the school year and the school day, which gave Rivera-O’Reilly the chance to point out that she has authored both of those bills now pending in the Senate.
Other candidate comments on issues included:
• Sanes said he is working on repairing the navigation system in St. Croix’s port so that ships don’t have to wait offshore if they arrive at night, wasting time and fuel until they can safely enter during daylight. He touted liquified natural gas as a solution to volatile energy costs and vowed to fight for the trash-to-energy project. He also touted his authorship of a parent-responsibility bill that would hold parents accountable for the actions of their minor children. He also said government employees should pay for their own gas and said building a central government complex with green technology would lower costs, save rent money paid for office space all over the island, and make it easier for residents to do business with government if it was all in one place.
• Myron Allick pointed to coal as a potential replacement for petroleum in WAPA’s generating facilities, saying coal is significantly cheaper. He said that the territory needs a greater emphasis on technical schools to help the hundreds of young people who graduate each year with no hope of getting a job on-island, and suggested incentives for teachers based on the progress of their students.
• Lee Seward called for streamlining the process by which entrepreneurs can obtain the permits and permissions necessary to start a business, suggesting a "one-stop" office rather than having them go from department to department to handle all the paperwork. Saying that WAPA pays $24 million a year to barge fuel around St. Croix from Hovensa to its power plants in Richmond, he called for construction of a cross-island pipeline to lower that cost, and eventual relocation of the power plants to the industrial area on the south side of the island. He decried that the Department of Education has no regular maintenance program so that schools are falling apart, suggesting maintenance people who actually lived on site might both provide better care of the buildings and increased security.
• Jn Baptiste called for an audit of WAPA, suggesting the controversial LEAC charge is "trumped up," and said that while he favors holding parents responsible for the actions of their children there should also be in place more services to support them, calling for a return to and adequate support for the Youth Commission, which has fallen into disuse. He urged dismantling the Waste Management Authority and returning it to the purview of the Department of Public Works.
• Judi Fricks called for a tax reform commission to study the entire system by which government is funded in the territory, saying that gross receipts and excise taxes were regressive. She called for greater cooperation between V.I. law enforcement and the TSA and other federal agencies to control the influx of firearms flooding the territory, and suggested outsourcing all food services, including to schools and prisons, as a way to save money. She cautioned that a growing business on the island is for people to "rent out" their legally licensed weapons, and said that in those cases where a crime is committed with a "rented" gun, the legal owner should be held as an accomplice to the crime. She also called for decentralizing the Department of Education, going instead to a school-based management system in which principals would have more personal control over how their schools are run.
• James touted self-employment, saying the island needed to inculcate an entrepreneurial spirit in its young people. Instead of encouraging youth to "get a job," he said, they should be encouraged to make a job. To lower power bills in the short term, he suggested renegotiating WAPA’s fuel agreement with Hovensa to seek a break on fuel prices. He also touted his authorship of the Education Reform Act passed by the Senate, which, among other things, calls for increased cultural education and standardized testing using tests prepared and graded on-island. "No one will graduate unable to read," he said.
• Thurland called for customs duties now performed by the federal government to be handled locally, giving the territory "more control over what goes in and what comes out." He said WAPA’s plants should be retrofitted to burn a cheaper fuel and government buildings should be outfitted with solar panels to take advantage of the territory’s abundant sunshine, pointing out that most government offices are not open at night, when solar power is not available. He touted the Senate’s re-creation of a multi-agency drug task force to curtail illicit drugs and promised to ensure that it receives adequate funding.
• Weber called for a three-year amnesty on the excise tax to help businesses get through the current economic slump. He said Congress should be encouraged to return fuel excise taxes from the sale of Hovensa’s gasoline to the territory, and that money could be used to lower local rates. He added the federal government needs to beef up its patrol of coastal waters to stem the influx of legal guns.
• Petersen said he wants to make sure the Economic Development Commission, in drawing new businesses to the territory and doesn’t give them an unfair advantage over existing, longtime locally owned businesses. His priority on energy is to "get off the oil, that expensive oil" used by WAPA. Every gun licensed in the territory should have a ballistics test on file so that when a shooting occurs there’s a record to look at to help track the weapon, he said. Gun owners should also be required to produce the weapon regularly to show that it is still in their possession, although crime needs to be addressed from a "social level," recognizing the hopelessness that leads many into crime. He also said the Senate had given up its fiduciary power by approving lump-sum budgets instead of line-item budgets, which gave lawmakers more direct control in how the government spends its money. He hesitated to endorse a government subsidy of the LEAC charge, saying he was reluctant to increase government spending and obligations but said a comprehensive plan was needed to address LEAC – either through federal fuel excise taxes or finding a lower-cost fuel.
• Rivera-O’Reilly said repairing, refurbishing and then maintaining WAPA’s generating plants would seriously lower the cost of power in the territory. She suggested moving government business from a five-day work week to a four-day, 10-hour-a-day week would have several benefits: government workers would have an extra day to take care of personal business without having to take time from work, and government buildings would be open one day less while still open the same number of hours. She also called for an end to the use of government cars for all except work-related issues. "We all owned cars before we were elected or hired," she pointed out.
• Capehart said high costs, particularly for electricity, have created a "state of emergency" for small businesses, and the government needs to step in and give local entrepreneurs a hand. She called for a comprehensive look at government spending, including all rents for government buildings and creation of a tax commission to study alternatives to the gross receipts tax. She also called for a comprehensive energy plan, and supported enhancing and expanding the police department in the face of rising crime.
