Wholesalers, restaurant operators, commercial fisherman and seafood lovers will not have to eliminate all stock of conch prior to the start of the closed season on July 1 as was stated by Planning and Natural Resources in a June 23 press release. (See story below "Closed season for conch/whelk.")
On Tuesday, DPNR Commissioner Dean C. Plaskett issued a statement which included the text of a 1997 amendment to previously enacted law which required a total ban on conch and whelks, including imported product, during the closed season.
The law says "the sale and transportation of any species of fish that is included in the closed season is permitted during the closed season if such fish is imported from outside the U.S. Virgin Islands or caught and stored prior to the closed season."
Sen. Donald "Ducks" Cole raised concern that DPNR was not enforcing the amended law when he heard radio reports of the original press statement announcing a total ban on conch.
Persons needing additional information on the regulations should contact DPNR's division of enforcement at 774-3320.

The House Resources Committee is set to vote on a bill submitted by Delegate to Congress Donna Christian Christensen that would allow the people of the Virgin Islands to choose the number of senators in their Legislature.
HR 2296 is to be marked up in the Resources Committee on Wednesday, Christensen said. The bill would amend the Revised Organic Act of the Virgin Islands and give the Virgin Islands Legislature the authority to restructure itself. If passed by the Resources Committee, the bill will go to the House floor for a vote July 10 or 11, she said.
"I am looking forward to a speedy passage of this legislation on Wednesday so that we can move it to the floor for final passage," Christensen said. "The bill in this form provides yet another level of authority or governance to the people of the Virgin Islands, and paves the way for the referendum to be held later this year. I hope though that, the Legislature will provide adequate discussion so that all alternative approaches to restructuring of our Legislature will receive due consideration."
The bill was spurred by Sen. Adlah "Foncie" Donastorg in 1998. Originally it called for reducing the number of V.I. senators from 15 to nine. However, in an effort to keep territorial politicians from coming back to Congress in the future seeking a change to the Organic Act for further reductions, Resources Committee Chairman Don Young advised that the exact number of senators and what constitutes a quorum be left open and that the number be determined by local law.
Hence the November referendum that will, if Congress passes HR 2296, allow voters to retain the status quo, or reduce the Senate from 15 to 11 or from 15 to nine.
"I’ve always felt the people should have the ultimate say in . . . how we shape and restructure our government," Donastorg said, adding that the effort to downsize the Legislature shows Congress that the local government is "being fiscally responsible."
The number of senators is one issue that has generated public debate of late. The other is senators' salaries.
Only two states pay their full-time legislatures more than the V.I. pays its 15 $65,000-a-year senators to represent 110,000 people. California’s legislators are paid $99,000 a year to represent more than 33 million residents while New York pays its legislators $70,000 a year to represent 18 million. For more information on the pay scales for all the states, click on "Table 1" at the National Conference of State Legislatures website.
Donastorg has said that by reducing the local Senate from 15 to nine, the government would save $2 million each two-year legislative term.

The House Resources Committee is set to vote on a bill submitted by Delegate to Congress Donna Christian Christensen that would allow the people of the Virgin Islands to choose the number of senators in their Legislature.
HR 2296 is to be marked up in the Resources Committee on Wednesday, Christensen said. The bill would amend the Revised Organic Act of the Virgin Islands and give the Virgin Islands Legislature the authority to restructure itself. If passed by the Resources Committee, the bill will go to the House floor for a vote July 10 or 11, she said.
"I am looking forward to a speedy passage of this legislation on Wednesday so that we can move it to the floor for final passage," Christensen said. "The bill in this form provides yet another level of authority or governance to the people of the Virgin Islands, and paves the way for the referendum to be held later this year. I hope though that, the Legislature will provide adequate discussion so that all alternative approaches to restructuring of our Legislature will receive due consideration."
The bill was spurred by Sen. Adlah "Foncie" Donastorg in 1998. Originally it called for reducing the number of V.I. senators from 15 to nine. However, in an effort to keep territorial politicians from coming back to Congress in the future seeking a change to the Organic Act for further reductions, Resources Committee Chairman Don Young advised that the exact number of senators and what constitutes a quorum be left open and that the number be determined by local law.
Hence the November referendum that will, if Congress passes HR 2296, allow voters to retain the status quo, or reduce the Senate from 15 to 11 or from 15 to nine.
"I’ve always felt the people should have the ultimate say in . . . how we shape and restructure our government," Donastorg said, adding that the effort to downsize the Legislature shows Congress that the local government is "being fiscally responsible."
The number of senators is one issue that has generated public debate of late. The other is senators' salaries.
Only two states pay their full-time legislatures more than the V.I. pays its 15 $65,000-a-year senators to represent 110,000 people. California’s legislators are paid $99,000 a year to represent more than 33 million residents while New York pays its legislators $70,000 a year to represent 18 million. For more information on the pay scales for all the states, click on "Table 1" at the National Conference of State Legislatures website.
Donastorg has said that by reducing the local Senate from 15 to nine, the government would save $2 million each two-year legislative term.

Changes in technology are giving hurricane forecasters and meteorologists new options in improving storm forecasts. However, an official of the National Weather Service in San Juan, Puerto Rico, warned Tuesday that no amount of technology will allow Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico residents to ignore the fact that they live in a hurricane-prone zone.
Armed with a computer presentation that detailed the 1999 Hurricane season and some of the new technology, Rafael Mojica, the NWS Warning and Coordination meteorologist, told a group of emergency planners that the new methods include the use of several computer models to generate an "ensemble forecast." The models use various weather conditions and principles to anticipate the track of a storm, usually over 72 hours.
Another advance in storm tracking and reporting is the use of dropsondes, a device deployed from a "hurricane hunter" aircraft in the eye of a storm.
In recent years, "the dropsondes have confirmed a perception that has been expressed here since Hurricane Marilyn, that wind velocity in hurricanes is always higher at the higher elevations," Mojica said. Often a "Category One at the surface, or at sea level, could be a Category Three storm at elevations of a thousand feet, like at Mountain Top on St. Thomas."
He summed up his detailed presentation by reminding conference attendees that no level of technology will change the fact that "St. Thomas has a hurricane problem." Mojica said the Northeast Caribbean lies in a virtual "hurricane alley" and there is not much we can do about that.
A similar presentation will be held Wednesday from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Senate building on St. John. Admission is free.

Fifth in a series
This week, June 25-28, top officials of the hospitality industry in the territory and the region are gathered in Cancun, Mexico, for the annual CHIC (for Caribbean Hotel Industry Conference) get-together of the CHA (for Caribbean Hotel Association). The theme for this year's meeting is heavy on the alphabet soup, but a telling acknowledgement of "the technology changes that are now driving the industry," as the conference web page puts it.
And that theme is: CHA-CHIC.COM 2000.
The association's mission statement is that it "is dedicated to excellence in hospitality, leadership in marketing, and sustainable growth in tourism, to benefit members and the wider Caribbean community."
The conference theme in its URL (for Uniform Resource Locater) web address format was chosen "to focus on the many operational and marketing changes that, through the new technologies – and in particular the Internet – have revolutionized our business," the conference web page states.
And any segment of the industry that isn't already there has a lot of catching up to do.
Tourism Commissioner Rafael Jackson, who began work in an "acting" basis in mid-March, says he wants to have the department's web site operational by October. He also says he intends to hire additional personnel for the physical offices the department has operated for years on the U.S. mainland. He has placed the cost of getting the web site designed and built at $350,000. The rent alone for the six mainland offices is currently $273,958, according to the administration's Five-Year Operating and Strategic Financial Plan.
Who's to say how the money is spent?
Jackson also has said that he is adamantly opposed to any kind of structured partnership between the public and private sectors in which the business community would be able to determine how the territory's bed tax money is spent. The 8 percent tax on guest accommodations goes into the government's Tourism Revolving Fund, which by law is earmarked for advertising and marketing the territory as a visitor destination (a law which is routinely stretched to accommodate funding for the territory's three major carnivals and assorted other events including St. Croix's triathlon and LPGA Tour events and Sinbad's 1999 Soul Music Festival on St. Thomas).
Jackson's stand is that it's public tax money and it must be government controlled. St. Thomas-St. John Hotel and Tourism Association president Richard Doumeng has pointed out that not one penny comes from the pockets of local residents (unless they opt for the occasional weekend getaway right here at home).
One of the recommended "initiatives" in the Five-Year Plan is that "The government should consider establishing a Tourism Authority with the responsibility to develop and execute the marketing and promotion initiatives funded by the Tourism Revolving Fund resources. Establishment of a Tourism Authority, composed of a public/private board of directors, will broaden the industry participation to market the U.S. Virgin Islands and enhance advertising, marketing and cooperative relationships." Given the potential benefits to the hospitality industry, the plan states, "some form of cost sharing with the private sector would appear to be desirable to boost the overall funding for tourism marketing and promotion."
A tourism authority is "vital, necessary and deserved," Doumeng said at the June 21 hotel association meeting. "It is not a power grab. It is a voice and a vote in formulating tourism policy in the future. It is a public/private partnership. . . We are not talking about taking it over and making it our own."
Tourism site has business-sector appeal
Public/private partnering, like dancing, doesn't necessarily mean clinging to each other, or even holding hands. When it comes to marketing the territory to potential visitors, the business sector outspends the government as a matter of course, particularly in the case of major hotels and resort properties owned and/or operated by large international chains that have their own marketing plans and programs. In the Internet era, the smallest hotels have their own sophisticated web sites, and the large resorts can be accessed through their corporate home pages. But even so, hoteliers say, it is important to have a single central clearing house where the virtual would-be visitor will find links to the individual properties and allied businesses.
This, in the view of many, would be the role of the Tourism site. In the case of St. Croix, however, private enterprise has moved ahead to fill the void. The web site VisitStCroix.com, begun by Tom Yaegel Associates just a year ago, carries advertising from 60 local companies, including the island's three largest hotels (the Buccaneer, Carambola and Divi Carina Bay), and had its one-millionth "hit" in May, according to Yaegel, a St. Croix property owner for 13 years.
Yet Yaegel sees a need for a government Tourism site. In a letter to the Source, he wrote that "the most effective site for the territory will be the one where the site infrastructure is funded from government sources, and business-specific advertising (available through advertisements and links) is paid for by private businesses." Late last year, Yaegel's firm submitted a proposal to Tourism to develop such a site.
He also wrote that "it is ridiculous not to have a web address appearing in the television advertisements" that Tourism is running nowadays. "For the St. Croix-specific ads," he said, "we have offered, at no charge, to let the Tourism Department use the VisitStCroix.com address" to give the government a means of gauging the appeal of the Internet to viewers.
To date, Yaegel said, he has received no answer to either offer.
How partnering works – or doesn't
The Source approached accommodations executives to ask how a Tourism Department website could benefit them, how much of their bookings come from Tourism outreach, what the mainland Tourism offices do or could do to help them, and how Tourism as a whole benefits or could benefit their operations. Some answers:
With regard to the coming Tourism web site, Nancy Schneider, director of events management at the Renaissance Grand Beach Resort on St. Thomas, said she hopes the home page will "make it very easy to click on attractions and accommodations, plus the ability to link for further information." It makes little sense to "go into lots of detail when all the hotels already have their own web sites," she added. "Just give information to help people narrow their search down – small versus large hotels, condos, villas."
Elizabeth Armstrong, general manager of The Buccaneer Hotel on St. Croix, said her Internet advice to Tourism is that "a web site needs to be fast to come up, not so loaded up with pictures that people get tired of waiting and exit out." It needs "to be maintained and current," she added, with hyperlinks to separate sites on the three main islands. And critical, she added, is "marketing the site so that it comes up on all of the search engines – and that's not an easy thing to do."
Armstrong shared her own learning experience with www.thebuccaneer.com: The site at first was "very elegant and good looking, with no attempt to do promotions and sales," she said. "Now I've got to having more promotional packages, ‘book-now' type messages."
With regard to bookings, most of them for the Renaissance, a Marriott property, "come through the corporate structure" and the St. Thomas-St. John Hotel and Tourism Association, Schneider said. "That engine is very strong," she said of the association's cooperative advertising.
But the private sector "can only do so much," she added. &q
uot;Without being able to piggyback onto destination advertising plugging the Virgin Islands in people's minds, it's much more difficult. With destination marketing you can see the numbers." The Tourism Department's spring television campaign on the mainland "is hitting now," she said, adding that the marketing "has really helped us with the summer months."
As for the impact of Tourism outreach in attracting visitors, it's not much, according to Armstrong. Most of The Buccaneer's business "comes because people know of The Buccaneer," she said. The hotel has been owned and operated by her family for half a century. "We have very good relationships with our travel partners and travel agents," she said. "We do participate in cooperative efforts, but I think the level of advertising done by the government is so small that the impact on my business is minimal."
Smaller is better – on the web
Two St. Thomas small hotel operators, Sam Boynes, owner of L'Hotel Boynes, and Eugene Smith, manager of Villa Blanca, said they're in business today because of the Internet. According to Smith, 85 percent of his customers find the hotel on-line. In the two years the hotel has had a web page, his occupancy rate has tripled, he said. Boynes attributed 40 percent of his traffic to his on-line site.
Eileen Duffy Irby said about 30 percent of the business for her St. John villa management company, Catered To, is coming from the Internet. She would like to see a Tourism web site with "at least the kind of information that they have in pamphlets." She recalled that the department produced a wedding-planning brochure several years ago that's no longer available and said "it would be good if they produced it again – and had it on-line."
Irby said her business gets good support from the mainland offices. "They produce and distribute a very well put together pamphlet having to do with all the villas," she said, and Catered To has been listed in it for 17 years – at no charge "so long as I have evidence of paying my room tax and submitting my occupancy reports."
Schneider said the mainland offices "could probably be more proactive in generating possible leads and, if it's a group, send word out to all the appropriate hotels." In her experience, she said, this never happens.
Nor, apparently, is there any follow-up with the party requesting information. As part of its research for this series, the Source called one mainland Tourism office and the department's toll-free 800 number requesting information to be used in planning a convention in 2001 for about 175 persons. Packages of attractive visitor guide magazines, brochures and other printed materials were mailed out promptly in both cases but neither included a cover letter – not even a generic one. And in neither case did the sending entity initiate any further client contact, such as a phone call or separately mailed letter.
Armstrong would like to see the mainland offices become "sales positions," with the staff spending "90 percent of the time out on the road visiting agencies, attending trade shows." And, she added, "You could do that job working from your home."
Since Tourism doesn't do it, Armstrong said, she has for years employed somebody who does. Covering New York and New England for her is "a lady who does sales out of her car with her laptop computer. She spends her time making the phone ring, not sitting in her office waiting for it to ring."
Friday: In conclusion, money matters

Fifth in a series
This week, June 25-28, top officials of the hospitality industry in the territory and the region are gathered in Cancun, Mexico, for the annual CHIC (for Caribbean Hotel Industry Conference) get-together of the CHA (for Caribbean Hotel Association). The theme for this year's meeting is heavy on the alphabet soup, but a telling acknowledgement of "the technology changes that are now driving the industry," as the conference web page puts it.
And that theme is: CHA-CHIC.COM 2000.
The association's mission statement is that it "is dedicated to excellence in hospitality, leadership in marketing, and sustainable growth in tourism, to benefit members and the wider Caribbean community."
The conference theme in its URL (for Uniform Resource Locater) web address format was chosen "to focus on the many operational and marketing changes that, through the new technologies – and in particular the Internet – have revolutionized our business," the conference web page states.
And any segment of the industry that isn't already there has a lot of catching up to do.
Tourism Commissioner Rafael Jackson, who began work in an "acting" basis in mid-March, says he wants to have the department's web site operational by October. He also says he intends to hire additional personnel for the physical offices the department has operated for years on the U.S. mainland. He has placed the cost of getting the web site designed and built at $350,000. The rent alone for the six mainland offices is currently $273,958, according to the administration's Five-Year Operating and Strategic Financial Plan.
Who's to say how the money is spent?
Jackson also has said that he is adamantly opposed to any kind of structured partnership between the public and private sectors in which the business community would be able to determine how the territory's bed tax money is spent. The 8 percent tax on guest accommodations goes into the government's Tourism Revolving Fund, which by law is earmarked for advertising and marketing the territory as a visitor destination (a law which is routinely stretched to accommodate funding for the territory's three major carnivals and assorted other events including St. Croix's triathlon and LPGA Tour events and Sinbad's 1999 Soul Music Festival on St. Thomas).
Jackson's stand is that it's public tax money and it must be government controlled. St. Thomas-St. John Hotel and Tourism Association president Richard Doumeng has pointed out that not one penny comes from the pockets of local residents (unless they opt for the occasional weekend getaway right here at home).
One of the recommended "initiatives" in the Five-Year Plan is that "The government should consider establishing a Tourism Authority with the responsibility to develop and execute the marketing and promotion initiatives funded by the Tourism Revolving Fund resources. Establishment of a Tourism Authority, composed of a public/private board of directors, will broaden the industry participation to market the U.S. Virgin Islands and enhance advertising, marketing and cooperative relationships." Given the potential benefits to the hospitality industry, the plan states, "some form of cost sharing with the private sector would appear to be desirable to boost the overall funding for tourism marketing and promotion."
A tourism authority is "vital, necessary and deserved," Doumeng said at the June 21 hotel association meeting. "It is not a power grab. It is a voice and a vote in formulating tourism policy in the future. It is a public/private partnership. . . We are not talking about taking it over and making it our own."
Tourism site has business-sector appeal
Public/private partnering, like dancing, doesn't necessarily mean clinging to each other, or even holding hands. When it comes to marketing the territory to potential visitors, the business sector outspends the government as a matter of course, particularly in the case of major hotels and resort properties owned and/or operated by large international chains that have their own marketing plans and programs. In the Internet era, the smallest hotels have their own sophisticated web sites, and the large resorts can be accessed through their corporate home pages. But even so, hoteliers say, it is important to have a single central clearing house where the virtual would-be visitor will find links to the individual properties and allied businesses.
This, in the view of many, would be the role of the Tourism site. In the case of St. Croix, however, private enterprise has moved ahead to fill the void. The web site VisitStCroix.com, begun by Tom Yaegel Associates just a year ago, carries advertising from 60 local companies, including the island's three largest hotels (the Buccaneer, Carambola and Divi Carina Bay), and had its one-millionth "hit" in May, according to Yaegel, a St. Croix property owner for 13 years.
Yet Yaegel sees a need for a government Tourism site. In a letter to the Source, he wrote that "the most effective site for the territory will be the one where the site infrastructure is funded from government sources, and business-specific advertising (available through advertisements and links) is paid for by private businesses." Late last year, Yaegel's firm submitted a proposal to Tourism to develop such a site.
He also wrote that "it is ridiculous not to have a web address appearing in the television advertisements" that Tourism is running nowadays. "For the St. Croix-specific ads," he said, "we have offered, at no charge, to let the Tourism Department use the VisitStCroix.com address" to give the government a means of gauging the appeal of the Internet to viewers.
To date, Yaegel said, he has received no answer to either offer.
How partnering works – or doesn't
The Source approached accommodations executives to ask how a Tourism Department website could benefit them, how much of their bookings come from Tourism outreach, what the mainland Tourism offices do or could do to help them, and how Tourism as a whole benefits or could benefit their operations. Some answers:
With regard to the coming Tourism web site, Nancy Schneider, director of events management at the Renaissance Grand Beach Resort on St. Thomas, said she hopes the home page will "make it very easy to click on attractions and accommodations, plus the ability to link for further information." It makes little sense to "go into lots of detail when all the hotels already have their own web sites," she added. "Just give information to help people narrow their search down – small versus large hotels, condos, villas."
Elizabeth Armstrong, general manager of The Buccaneer Hotel on St. Croix, said her Internet advice to Tourism is that "a web site needs to be fast to come up, not so loaded up with pictures that people get tired of waiting and exit out." It needs "to be maintained and current," she added, with hyperlinks to separate sites on the three main islands. And critical, she added, is "marketing the site so that it comes up on all of the search engines – and that's not an easy thing to do."
Armstrong shared her own learning experience with www.thebuccaneer.com: The site at first was "very elegant and good looking, with no attempt to do promotions and sales," she said. "Now I've got to having more promotional packages, ‘book-now' type messages."
With regard to bookings, most of them for the Renaissance, a Marriott property, "come through the corporate structure" and the St. Thomas-St. John Hotel and Tourism Association, Schneider said. "That engine is very strong," she said of the association's cooperative advertising.
But the private sector "can only do so much," she added. &q
uot;Without being able to piggyback onto destination advertising plugging the Virgin Islands in people's minds, it's much more difficult. With destination marketing you can see the numbers." The Tourism Department's spring television campaign on the mainland "is hitting now," she said, adding that the marketing "has really helped us with the summer months."
As for the impact of Tourism outreach in attracting visitors, it's not much, according to Armstrong. Most of The Buccaneer's business "comes because people know of The Buccaneer," she said. The hotel has been owned and operated by her family for half a century. "We have very good relationships with our travel partners and travel agents," she said. "We do participate in cooperative efforts, but I think the level of advertising done by the government is so small that the impact on my business is minimal."
Smaller is better – on the web
Two St. Thomas small hotel operators, Sam Boynes, owner of L'Hotel Boynes, and Eugene Smith, manager of Villa Blanca, said they're in business today because of the Internet. According to Smith, 85 percent of his customers find the hotel on-line. In the two years the hotel has had a web page, his occupancy rate has tripled, he said. Boynes attributed 40 percent of his traffic to his on-line site.
Eileen Duffy Irby said about 30 percent of the business for her St. John villa management company, Catered To, is coming from the Internet. She would like to see a Tourism web site with "at least the kind of information that they have in pamphlets." She recalled that the department produced a wedding-planning brochure several years ago that's no longer available and said "it would be good if they produced it again – and had it on-line."
Irby said her business gets good support from the mainland offices. "They produce and distribute a very well put together pamphlet having to do with all the villas," she said, and Catered To has been listed in it for 17 years – at no charge "so long as I have evidence of paying my room tax and submitting my occupancy reports."
Schneider said the mainland offices "could probably be more proactive in generating possible leads and, if it's a group, send word out to all the appropriate hotels." In her experience, she said, this never happens.
Nor, apparently, is there any follow-up with the party requesting information. As part of its research for this series, the Source called one mainland Tourism office and the department's toll-free 800 number requesting information to be used in planning a convention in 2001 for about 175 persons. Packages of attractive visitor guide magazines, brochures and other printed materials were mailed out promptly in both cases but neither included a cover letter – not even a generic one. And in neither case did the sending entity initiate any further client contact, such as a phone call or separately mailed letter.
Armstrong would like to see the mainland offices become "sales positions," with the staff spending "90 percent of the time out on the road visiting agencies, attending trade shows." And, she added, "You could do that job working from your home."
Since Tourism doesn't do it, Armstrong said, she has for years employed somebody who does. Covering New York and New England for her is "a lady who does sales out of her car with her laptop computer. She spends her time making the phone ring, not sitting in her office waiting for it to ring."
Friday: In conclusion, money matters

Sen. Adlah "Foncie" Donastorg is urging the public to attend Wednesday's 10 a.m. meeting of the Senate Government Operations Committee on St. Thomas to hear testimony on a bill requiring the Public Services Commission to investigate local telephone rates.
"Call or write your senators, the people you elected," Donastorg said in a press release, "or come to the meeting and testify."
Donastorg has been fighting an uphill battle for an investigation into V.I. Telephone Corp. rates. Almost three years ago, the Senate voted unanimously to petition the PSC to reduce phone rates. Since then, the commission has blocked all efforts at investigation.
The legislation Donastorg has proposed conforms, he said, to recommendations made last December by V.I. Inspector General Steven Van Beverhoudt, who noted that many states require periodic telephone rate investigations. Van Beverhoudt is expected to testify Wednesday, according to Nicole Bollentini, Donastorg's spokesperson.
PSC executive director Keithly Joseph said the last investigation of Vitelco rates was in August 1992. Bollentini said that was the conclusion of a probe begun in 1990.
Joseph said Government Operations Committee chair Gregory Bennerson wrote asking PSC board chair Walter Challenger to attend the hearing. "I have forwarded the letter to the chairman, but I haven't had a response," Joseph said, adding, "I will definitely be going, myself."
Vitelco president Samuel Ebbesen is also among those invited to testify.
In a Senate hearing a year ago convened to investigate PSC practices, Jamshed Madan of Georgetown Consulting Group testified that Vitelco passes a regular charge to cover the costs of rate investigations on to its customers, regardless of whether investigations are done.
Madan's company served as a PSC consultant for many years. Its last undertaking for the commission was to prepare a report on Vitelco rate practices after the 22nd Legislature asked the PSC to consider reducing phone rates in view of the company's having been granted full Industrial Development Commission tax benefits. Madan recommended an investigation. The PSC, with Challenger as chair, rejected the recommendation.
Challenger's continuing chairmanship of the commission is an issue in itself. His term expired June 2, 1999, but PSC members whose terms expire can continue to serve until their successors are confirmed.
In his press release, Donastorg said he has "a tremendous amount of information about Vitelco's questionable practices and corruption within the PSC." He cited as his major areas of concern:
– Phone rates have not been reviewed since 1990, and the last two rate investigations, in 1990 and 1988, each resulted in a rate decrease.
– Current Vitelco profits are estimated at over 25 percent, when by law the utility's maximum allowed rate of return is 11.5 percent.
– Earnings more than tripled, from $6.2 million in 1996 to $20.5 in 1997, after the company was granted 100 percent tax breaks, and estimated earnings continue to skyrocket.
– Vitelco has more than doubled "advisory fees" and dividends paid to owner Jeffrey Prosser and his Innovative Communication Corp., Vitelco's parent company. Donastorg said annual dividend payments to Prosser increased from $3.5 million in 1996 to $7.6 million in 1997.
– Vitelco billed customers more than $2 million a year for hurricane insurance it never purchased, then used a claim of financial hardship due to its lack of insurance as the basis for seeking more tax breaks. Donastorg said the company has not provided the PSC with documentation of its hurricane losses.
– Georgetown Consulting Group's preliminary report a year ago stated that Vitelco had overcharged consumers by more than $20 million.
– Vitelco has added more than 50 employees from other ICC companies to its payroll who do no work for the phone company.
– The Inspector General has recommended that the PSC conduct a telephone rate investigation and that the territory join the many states that mandate periodic rate reviews.
– Vitelco has, Donastorg said, used a relationship with the PSC to block competition and engage in anti-business practices, including passing on illegal costs to private local pay-phone operators.
– The PSC has, Donastorg said, failed the public by not investigating Vitelco, not requiring the company to file regular reports, ignoring procedures for electing a new chair and trying through favors "to influence officials."

GERS invites members over 30 to participate in a Preretirement Workshop at 9 a.m. on Wednesday, July 19, in the GERS Conference Room, 3005 Orange Grove St. Croix.
Learn more about Social Security and System benefits, health insurance coverage and how to live a more healthful life.
For additional information or to pre-register, call 773-5480. Registration deadline is Friday, July 14.

GERS will hold a Preretirement Workshop from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. on Wednesday, July 12, in the GERS Conference Room, 3rd floor of the GERS Building.
Learn more aboout Social Security and System benefits, Health Insurance Coverage, and how to live a more healthful life.
For additional information or to pre-register call 776-7703 ext. 4203. Deadline for registering is Monday, July 10.

The Tropical/Crowley Shipping Shipwreckers battled their way back from behind the Senate Sluggers to earn a berth in the Government and Industrial Coed Slowpitch Softball League "best of the rest" series championship. They will face the winner of the game between Postal and Apex.
The Shipwreckers rallied to beat the Senate Sluggers, 9-8, in the single-elimination tournament play Friday night..
The Sluggers scored three quick runs as cleanup hitter Greg Smith hit a base-clearing triple in the first inning. However, the Sluggers left the bases loaded in the inning. The Shipwreckers answered with two runs of their own in the bottom of the first inning to keep the game close.
The Sluggers maintained a three-run lead, 8-5, going into the bottom of the seventh inning. The Shipwreckers' Corlette Morris struck out, then Annette Turnbull reached on an error by Slugger first basewoman Nicole Rhymer. This opened up the floodgates. The Shipwreckers tied the score as Sandito Brito walked and Fernando Leger and Mario De La Cruz followed with back-to-back singles. The Shipwreckers loaded the bases and Sluggers pitcher Mercedez LaTiff walked in the winning game-ending run.
The Sluggers' first four batters accounted for all of their hits. Maurice Foy had three, Kacy Hendricks had two, and Smith was perfect at the plate in two appearances.
For the Shipwreckers, Leger had three hits in four at bats. De La Cruz and Rodney Evans each added two for four performances.