MOMS, a support group of mothers who are experiencing difficulty raising their sons will meet at 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, June 28, at the Legislature Conference Room.
Ms. Carol Henneman will be the guest speaker. For more information call Ms. Fahie at 693-3536 or Ms. Sadler at 693-3618.

An early-retirement incentive bill that caused fireworks in the Senate in March even before it was introduced has now been submitted to the Legislature by Gov. Charles W. Turnbull.
Titled the Public Employees Voluntary Separation Incentive Act of 2000, the bill offers an alternative to a bill sponsored by Sens. Donald "Ducks" Cole, Almando "Rocky" Liburd and David Jones. Government Employees Retirement System board chair Corinne King rejected that measure at a March hearing of the Senate Government Operations Committee.
King said at the hearing that the government couldn't guarantee the $15 million proposed to finance the senators' early retirement program. Ira Mills, director of the Office of Management and Budget, then told the lawmakers that he had a retirement plan of his own which, he said, would cost about $9 million. His announcement was met with astonishment by the senators, who accused Mills of "sabotaging" their proposal.
The bill just now submitted by the governor calls for financing of $15 million from the proceeds of the government's $300 million bond issue last year.
Cole said Wednesday that he, along with Liburd and Jones, met to discuss the new proposal with GERS representatives including King, actuary Howard Rog and executive director Lawrence Bryan, as well as Mills and John deJongh, who chaired the Government House task force that produced a five-year economic recovery plan for the territory.
Liburd said he asked Rog to calculate the number of employees with 25 to 30 years of government service in the system so he could project the cost of the proposal and how best to maximize the $15 million. "We want no unfunded liability," Liburd said.
The senators' proposal, titled the Early Retirement Incentive Act, would allow employees with 25 years of service to "buy" their remaining time toward retirement eligibility by contributing 8 percent of their annuity over the remaining years they would otherwise have to work before retiring. "The purpose of the plan is to reduce the government payroll so employees can retire early without penalty," Cole said.
According to Cole, "The difference between our plan and the governor's is that his plan gives no money to GERS; it goes directly to the employee. Our plan goes to GERS, giving them an infusion in funds so they can invest it." He added, "The governor doesn't want to give any money to GERS."
Liburd said he was surprised that the governor sent down his plan before the figures had gotten back from Rog so that the senators could further evaluate their own plan.
The administration plan addresses only those employees with at least 30 years of service. It would give eligible classified employees a lump-sum payment of 30 percent of their salary to leave service early. Unclassified employees would get 15 percent. The proposal applies only to the executive branch, whereas the senators' plan would cover employees of all three branches of government.
In a letter to Senate president Vargrave Richards, Turnbull said the purpose of his bill is to address the "precarious financial condition" of the government and reduce the government's debt. The governor cited Act 6297 which, among other things, mandated the sum of $15 million from bond proceeds to be used as retirement incentive payments to government employees. "Because the program is cost neutral, it will have no effect on the GERS," he stated.
No legislative hearing has yet been scheduled on either plan. The senators' bill is sitting in the Government Operations Committee; the governor's plan is on Richards' desk.
The governor called a special legislative session for Friday to address a separate retirement proposal addressing the Judges Pension Fund and the Governors and Lieutenant Governors Retirement Fund.

The owner of the territory's two Plaza Extra supermarkets entered a guilty plea in U.S. District Court on St. Thomas Thursday to charges of employing illegal aliens that stemmed from a raid on the stores and another establishment last summer.
Federal agents raided the supermarkets on St. Thomas and St. Croix last August in an operation staged by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Plaza Extra owner Fathi Yusef was arrested along with five other persons. At the time authorities said the arrests were part of an investigation into the smuggling of Arab nationals into the United States.
Yusef, a naturalized U.S. citizen who has resided on St. Croix for three decades, pleaded guilty Thursday to three counts of employing illegal aliens.
Four remaining co-defendants — Ali Abu Ahmad, Abu Hussein, Amjad Muhyeddin and Taliai Mustafa — are scheduled to go to trial Monday on charges of conspiracy to smuggle illegal aliens and related charges in each individual case.
The third establishment raided in August was a convenience market in Lindbergh Bay operated by Ahmad, who now operates the Friendly Grocery and Gas Station on Crown Mountain Road.
The early evening swat-style raids reportedly stemmed from the February 1999 arrest in San Juan of two Arab nationals illegally in the country as they attempted to board a commercial airliner bound for Miami. At that time investigators said the pair had been assisted by six other Arabs in making their way to Puerto Rico from St. Maarten.
An INS news release issued the morning following the raids stated that all of those charged were U.S. citizens except for Hussein, who had permanent residency status. It also said that the arrests were related to a scheme whereby illegal aliens smuggled into the territory were "employed in local businesses owned and/or operated by Arab nationals who for an additional fee allegedly would find them spouses to become legal residents." Since that time, federal law officials in the Virgin Islands have been reluctant to provide details concerning the investigation.
On Thursday afternoon, Assistant U.S. Attorney Hugh P. Mabe said Yusef would be sentenced after the proceedings involving the other four defendants are concluded. He declined to comment on the pending trial of the other defendants.

The owner of the territory's two Plaza Extra supermarkets entered a guilty plea Thursday in U.S. District Court on St. Thomas to charges of employing illegal aliens that stemmed from a raid on the stores and another establishment last summer.
Federal agents raided the supermarkets on St. Thomas and St. Croix last August in an operation staged by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Plaza Extra owner Fathi Yusef was arrested along with five other persons. At the time authorities said the arrests were part of an investigation into the smuggling of Arab nationals into the United States.
Yusef, a naturalized U.S. citizen who has lived on St. Croix for three decades, pleaded guilty to three counts of employing illegal aliens.
Four remaining co-defendants — Ali Abu Ahmad, Abu Hussein, Amjad Muhyeddin and Taliai Mustafa — are scheduled to go to trial Monday on charges of conspiracy to smuggle illegal aliens and related charges in each individual case.
The third store raided in August was a convenience market in Lindbergh Bay operated by Ahmad, who now runs the Friendly Grocery and Gas Station on Crown Mountain Road.
The early evening swat-style raids reportedly stemmed from the February 1999 arrest in San Juan of two Arab nationals illegally in the country as they attempted to board a commercial airliner for Miami. At that time investigators said the pair had been assisted by six other Arabs in making their way to Puerto Rico from St. Maarten.
An INS news release issued the morning following the raids stated that all of those charged were U.S. citizens except for Hussein, who had permanent residency status. It also said that the arrests were related to a scheme whereby illegal aliens smuggled into the territory were "employed in local businesses owned and/or operated by Arab nationals who for an additional fee allegedly would find them spouses to become legal residents."
Since that time, federal law officials in the Virgin Islands have been reluctant to provide details about the investigation.
On Thursday afternoon, Assistant U.S. Attorney Hugh P. Mabe said Yusef would be sentenced after the proceedings involving the other four defendants are concluded. He declined to comment on the pending trial of the other defendants.

Funeral services are set for Monday for former V.I. police commissioner George A. Farrelly who died earlier this week of an apparent massive heart attack.
The first of two viewings is set for Sunday from 5 to 6 p.m. at the James Memorial Funeral Home. A second viewing will precede the funeral service at 10 a.m. at the Holy Cross Catholic Church. Burial will follow in the veterans section of Kingshill Cemetery.
Farrelly served as police commissioner in the Luis Administration and was recently
a member of the Board of Trustees of the Government Employees Retirement System.
Farrelly, the nephew of former governor Alexander Farrelly, was also the owner of GAF Security Services with offices on both St. Thomas and St. Croix.

While Education Commissioner Ruby Simmonds was attending a federal funding seminar Thursday on St. Croix, the Education Department issued a plea for teachers to notify the department if they do not plan to return to work in the fall.
Alscess Lewis-Brown, director of Human Resources, said, "We ask teachers and support staff members to confirm their work plans for the upcoming school year. We appeal to those who are considering leaving their current position to let us know, even informally, so that we may be better prepared to begin the new school year."
She said rumors abound that many teachers will not return in the fall. "We just ask our colleagues to give us the courtesy of a heads-up, so that our children are not caught short in August," she said in the release.
In February members of the Ninth Grade Parents Group at Charlotte Amalie marched on Government House to protest the shortage of teachers at the school. The group was especially concerned about the lack of teachers of required courses such as general science and math. They also pointed out there were not enough librarians at the school. One librarian served more than 2,000 students last year.
Some feel low pay for teachers is the problem, but many teachers point to lack of organization, high absenteeism, the Notice of Personnel Action (NOPA) process and low morale as the real problems.
One teacher went almost the entire year without ever getting her NOPA processed. She won't be returning.
Another teacher who is not planning on returning said, "No one in the administration really wants to do anything to change the situation. No one really cares."
The absentee rate on any given day still hovers around 10 percent, a problem that has existed for many years.
Simmonds, speaking at the meeting on St. Croix, blamed bureaucracy, criticism and lawsuits for the problems in the department.
She called the territory a "quick fix" society where people voice their dissatisfaction through the media.
"The department, in a desire to appease, diverts its attention" from its focus on problem-solving, she said.
"Maybe we should shut the entire system down for a year," she said, while the problems are addressed.

Thirty-nine illegal Chinese aliens who landed on St. Thomas this week pleaded guilty Thursday in federal court to charges that they entered the territory illegally.
They were sentenced to five days in prison and will be turned over to the Immigration and Naturalization Service to be processed.
The illegal aliens were intercepted Wednesday morning in Estate Tabor and Harmony. Area residents reported to authorities that the Chinese nationals were seen making their way to the Tabor and Harmony neighborhood from Sunsi Beach where they landed.
INS officials have not been told where the latest group of Chinese nationals came from. They have admitted only to arriving by boat Tuesday night.

Alert beachgoers acted quickly to save an Atlanta man and his daughter who were on the verge of drowning Thursday afternoon at Magens Bay beach.
The man, Demetrius Lovejoy, was teaching his daughter Laquesha to swim at around 5:30 p.m. when Lovejoy got into deep water. Both he and his daughter panicked. They called out for help and soon fell out of sight, beneath the surface of the water.
People on the beach heard the cries for help, jumped in and swam out to the father and daughter and returned them to shore. Lovejoy was reportedly unconscious when the rescuers got him back to the beach where others worked on both the man and his daughter to revive them.
Both appeared to be OK by the time an ambulance crew arrived. They were taken to the Roy L. Schneider Hospital for a complete examination.

The turnout at Wednesday night's first in a series of three town meetings in the territory to discuss flooding problems and how to solve them was small, but the experience of those who chose to take part ran deep.
About a dozen members of the community pointed out that systems have long been in place to mitigate – that is, lessen the impact of – flood damage whenever excessive rain occurs. The problem, they said, is that these systems of dams and diversion ponds are no longer used and, in many cases, are no longer usable without extensive renovation work.
Bruce Potter of Island Resources Foundation, which has been contracted by the V.I. Territorial Emergency Management Agency to develop a flood mitigation plan for the Virgin Islands, commented early on, "The places that flood today are the places that always flooded."
The remark came as those attending the meeting in VITEMA headquarters glanced at computer-generated maps of St. Thomas incorporating aerial photography and state-of-the-art imaging. Purple streaks along coastlines and streaming down from mountain heights represented places known to be flood prone from years of record-keeping and memory-keeping. Green and yellow indicated areas subject to storm surge in the event of different categories of hurricanes.
The "areas of concern" ranged far and wide: Nadir, Savan, Contant, Tutu Valley, Frenchtown, Sugar Estate, Kirwan Terrace, Turpentine Run, Bournefield, Paul M. Pearson Gardens, Bovoni, Havensight, Bordeaux. And more.
Potter noted that it was not enough to prepare a flood mitigation plan keyed to the half-year designated as hurricane season, because "historically some of the greatest rainfall has occurred at other times." Mary Moorhead of the VITEMA staff cited the 24-hour deluge of April 1983 that left Main Street inches deep in mud. Environmentalist Helen Gjessing recalled "steady rain for eight hours" on a Mothers Day probably in 1959 when she remembered seeing a Volkswagen bug "floating down the street."
Potter explained that a tri-island steering committee comprising representatives of local not-for-profit organizations, academic and research entities and government agencies had spent five weeks providing input into documenting flood-prone areas, climatic conditions and efforts at mitigation. Three conclusions emerged, he said:
"First, there is a year-round potential for flooding. Second, there is a high variability in rainfall. And third, what we don't need in the Virgin Islands is another lame institution that doesn't have the resources needed" to meet a mandate to "do something" about the problem.
No V.I. government agency other than VITEMA was represented at the meeting, although Potter said invitations had been extended to a number of departments.
Getting to the bottom is the problem
Roy Howard, a Savan resident, cited the importance of dams to divert downward waterflow. "We try to solve the problem at the bottom, and you can't," he said. "You've got to solve it before it all gets to the bottom." Howard, a leader community efforts to clean out the Savan gut and install filters along its descent, said, "Over the last 12 years, silt and garbage and bottles have piled up 10 feet high" at the bottom.
One participant noted that efforts by individual property owners to keep water away from their homes by "building walls makes it worse." Another commented, "People have a gut leading the water from their home out to the street or onto their neighbor's property."
Alvin Powell Jr., a resident of Nadir for 25 years, noted that flooding occurs in that low-lying area "every single year. If we miss a year, we're lucky." In discussion it was stated that water flows into the area from Brookman Road by the stone quarry, from the surrounding hillsides, from the adjacent public housing, and in the case of hurricanes, even "from the ocean upland." Homes along the 10-foot-deep gut and those across the road in Sanchez Town are inundated when water surges down and overflows the canal "in minutes." Powell said.
The small bridge that serves as a dam will be removed if and when "the bridge to nowhere" is ever linked to a road, he said.
Dams and ponds once worked
Cedric Lewis said there are three dams upstream of the bridge and that cleaning them would have a huge impact. The first, he said, is known as the Lockhart Dam, and silt from construction in the area has completely filled it. Going east, he said, the next is on "the Petersen property" where there is even a waterfall, and farther east is the third, on property owned by the Harthman family.
A dam in Donoe "is also filled with silt," Lewis said, and one in Tutu "is not only filled in but grown to trees." Also, he said, the Michelle Motel in Altona was built by an engineer "who put a gut under the motel. Then Public Works came in and closed it off."
Howard recalled a time when there was a pond near the Michelle Motel easily 6 feet deep "where we would swim" as youngsters. "It's not there now," he added.
A resident of upper Contant said a gut behind her property once carried rainfall down by the airport. But then the owner of the property above her "decided to fill in the gut to have more land for development."
The ensuing discussion started with someone saying "the government should see that the man opens up the gut" but led into references to "the maze of permits" and "lack of enforcement" of regulations. "The larger issue," Potter interjected, "is how do we make people understand that you can't just keep doing this stuff?"
Road engineering was another topic Howard touched upon. "Small culverts only good for dry day," he commented. As opposed to building such culverts on the "down" side of hilly roads, he said, the more effective way to control waterflow is to force it back to the mountain side of the road and use a "sink and bridge" technique to channel it downward gradually.
Among the modern-day engineering projects that brought derisive comments were the "bridge to nowhere" in Nadir, the intersection at Fort Mylner/Tutu Park Mall, and the new drainage system along Harwood Highway "linking culverts with concrete."
Gjessing said the policy of late has been to "make wider and wider guts and, at the bottom, put the water into the ocean as fast as you can." Instead, she said "why not rejuvenate" the old systems of diverting water into little ponds?
Howard shared her sentiments: "Today we have heavy equipment and planning in offices with air-conditioning, and we're not getting what we used to do with a pick."
Potter said toward the end of the meeting that he had "thought we would be talking more about engineering issues." He said the steering committee and research associates had not "addressed activating and using systems that were built by people who had to live with those situations."
A second meeting was held on St. John Thursday night. The third will take place on St. Croix Friday from 7 to 9 p.m. in the Educational Department Curriculum Center.

"It's going to be rough Friday" at Gov. Charles Turnbull's special session of the Legislature. The words were Sen. Anne Golden's, but the sentiment seems to be shared by many of her colleagues who aren't happy about being asked to appropriate retirement funds for governors and judges when they recently had to forgo an increase in benefits for legislators.
As the administration explains it, the governor is only asking for funding for existing obligations. But politically the timing is bad.
Several senators declared in Monday's session that they will not attend, Golden said. Although she indicated she would attend, she added, "He needs to pull that thing back."
Turnbull is asking the Legislature to appropriate $2.9 million from the interest earned on bond proceeds to the Elected Governors and Lieutenant Governors Retirement Fund and to the Judges Pension Fund.
Sen. Donald "Ducks" Cole predicted a feeding frenzy as senators attempt to tap into the same funding source. He said when he tried last fall to use interest from bond revenues for public schools, the administration's position was that such an appropriation would compromise the bonds.
Turnbull aide James O'Bryan said Thursday that the government has been paying retirees who should be paid from the special pension funds directly from the General Fund instead. There hasn't been an appropriation to the pension funds since "the early '90s."
Finance Commissioner Bernice Turnbull stopped making the payments from the General Fund a couple of months ago after the Legislature chastised her for using General Fund monies for other obligations that were to be paid from special appropriations, O'Bryan said.
He said recipients have missed four pay periods. They are paid every two weeks.
Those going without are former Govs. Juan Luis, Alexander Farrelly and Roy Schneider; former Lt. Govs. Derek Hodge and Kenneth Mapp; and former Territorial Court Judges Eileen Petersen, Henry Feuerzeig and Verne Hodge, according to O'Bryan.
The Judges Pension Fund dates back to the late 1970s, but covers only judges sitting at that time. The Governors Retirement Fund was passed shortly after the 1990 election, O'Bryan said. In 1993, it was expanded to include lieutenant governors. There is no provision in this law for widowed spouses of retired governors or lieutenant governors.
Under the act, retired governors receive 40 percent of their $80,000 salary after one full term and 80 percent after two terms, O'Bryan said. There is no payment for a partial term. The same applies to lieutenant governors, but their salary is $75,000.
Judges with 20 years of service are paid the full salary — 100,000, or $110,000 for the presiding judge — under the retirement measure that covers judges who were on the bench in 1976.