Dear Source:
I, as many other people, were shocked about the possibility of an employee of the Government of the VI being able to put in for such benefits as past sick leave pay, etc. How can the Government, in the state that it's in, justify a law that allows for this?
And based upon what the Governor has stated about there being no funds to pay retroactive wages, Judge Hodge should be at the end of the line for his money. There can be no justification to pay Judge Hodge and not pay retroactive wages which are just as legal.
Dr. Susan G.S. Anderson

A frequent visitor to St. Thomas was shot Wednesday morning outside the Kmart store in Lockhart Garden Shopping Center after he reportedly refused to buy marijuana from two unidentified men.
Deputy Police Chief Theodore Carty said Garfield Perry was shot in the buttocks after a scuffle with his two attackers. Carty said police investigators were told that Perry was attacked and shot after he turned down their offer to buy drugs and after he declined to tell the two whether he was a cruise ship passenger.
The two suspects fled towards the Oswald Harris Court housing community after Perry was shot.
Carty said the victim was to be released from the Roy L. Schneider Hospital after treatment for his injuries. The deputy chief said the investigation is ongoing and urged anyone with information to contact detectives at 774-4050 or 911.

Yet another date has been set for the bribery trial of Innovative Communication Corp. Vice President John Tutein.
The former V.I. senator's trial is scheduled to start on Feb. 14 in U.S. District Court on St. Thomas. It was to have begun in August but has been postponed several times following motions filed by his St. Thomas attorney Treston Moore.
Tutein is accused of offering Sen. Allie-Allison Petrus and his associates cash, a mobile TV van and equipment worth $177,000 for a youth program begun by the senator.
Prosecutors contend the offers constituted bribes intended to influence Petrus's vote in May on ICC owner Jeffrey Prosser's proposal to give the government land on St. Croix and fund various capital projects throughout the territory, in return for 30-year tax exemptions for 10 businesses owned by Prosser, including ICC.
Depending on the source, the value of the exemptions to the Prosser-owned businesses was somewhere between $180 million and $3.5 billion.
The Senate approved a modified version of the so-called "Prosser deal" on a vote of 8-7, but Gov. Charles Turnbull subsequently vetoed it.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Azekah Jennings said that because of motions made by Moore to dismiss the case and subsequent replies by the prosecution, the trial has taken some time to start. He said such procedures weren’t unusual.
In several motions Moore has asked to have four of the charges against his client dismissed on grounds of "vagueness and over-breadth." He also said Tutein had the right under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution "to financially support candidates," "to financially support projects that elected officials may support" and "to try to persuade elected officials to. . . support legislation."
Curtis Gomez, the assistant U.S. attorney prosecuting the case, argued in opposition that Moore’s arguments "stray wide of their target" and "lack any support in law." Jennings said the government is in the process of responding to all the defense’s motions.

The threatened federal takeover of the V.I. Occupational Safety and Health Program was averted Tuesday as Gov. Charles Turnbull signed a bill appropriating almost $750,000 for the program.
Turnbull had to call a special session of the Senate last week so it could appropriate $748,428 for the local OSHA program from the Caribbean Basin Initiative Fund. Regional administrators of the federal OSHA program had, according to Turnbull and Labor Commissioner Sonia Jacobs Dow, threatened to take over the V.I operation because of a lack of staff, training and equipment.
The local program is funded by a 50-50 grant, meaning the V.I. government must match what the federal government provides. Turnbull said that for the last eight fiscal quarters the territory hasn’t been able to meet the match.
At last week’s special session, Dow asserted that Patricia Clark, OSHA’s Region II administrator, had an agenda to "colonize" the local program. Turnbull has said a takeover could have opened "the door to other takeovers by the federal government."
"With funding in place, the Department of Labor will now be able to hire staff, provide mandatory training and purchase protective field equipment for compliance personnel," Turnbull said, adding that the law "mutes any effort" to remove the OSHA program from the local government.
Following last week’s Senate session, Clark and a Region II spokeswoman declined to comment.

Don't bother trying to find out what the official low temperature was in the Virgin Islands on any particularly chilly night in the last couple of weeks. The answer is the same, no matter what the date: There wasn't any.
That's because "there is no official climatic data recording station in the Virgin Islands," Henry Laskosky, lead forecaster with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in San Juan, explained.
At the St. Thomas and St. Croix airports, automated observation systems record temperatures and other weather data for transmission to the NOAA station in San Juan. However, hardly anybody spends their nights at an airport, and the temperatures there, at or near sea level, are likely to be significantly higher than than those at the higher elevations where much of the population resides.
But unofficially, there's no question: It has been bone-chilling cold lately, even for January, in the American Paradise.
On St. John, Bordeaux Mountain resident Fred Trayser recalled, "Last year we had one very cold, short period of two to three days." But, he said, in the five years he has lived there, "this is the longest sustained period."
Naturalist Will Henderson, who also lives on the mountain, has been keeping his own records for years. This month, he recorded lows of 62 on Jan. 17 and 18, and of 63 on Jan. 16, 19 and 20.
"Normally, I'm 5 degrees lower than sea level," he said. His home is about a thousand feet up, "and that corresponds to what they normally cite as one degree per 200 feet of elevation." He suggested that "it is probably more significant that the daily highs dropped down" for that period. He recorded maximums of just 69 degrees for Jan. 16, 17 and 19.
Henderson also cited the winds of that period. "Up on the mountain, it was roaring," he said. "My anemometer [a device to measure wind speed] blew away, and I haven't replaced it."
On St. Croix, Sally Lawaetz, whose late mother-in-law collected weather data for NOAA for many years, said the thermometer at her home on the island's West End "has gotten down to 62, with a couple days of 63 and 64" this month. That's nowhere near a record, though, she said.
"We had 54 degrees once, about 20 years ago," she recalled. "You could see your breath. It was delightful!"
Family patriarch Frits Lawaetz recalled that once the thermometer at his property showed a sudden drop to 41 — the same day hail was reported on St. Croix. "But that was just a fluke that quickly passed," he said.
Atop St. Thomas's Crown Mountain, farmer Michael Bryan is still "wearing long-sleeved shirts to work every morning," his wife, Tracey, said. There's no thermometer up there, she said, but "this is the coldest it's been in a very long time." Fortunately, she added, "the chickens have thick feathers."
Edie P. Johnson, who lives in upper Contant on St. Thomas, said the thermometer outside one of her windows showed the temperature in the mid-60s one recent night, "but the wind chill factor was in the 50s."
Over the Martin Luther King Day weekend, Jan. 14-17, in addition to experiencing plummeting temperatures, the whole territory was buffeted by high and howling winds. The Water And Power Authority attributed a series of outages on St. Croix and St. Thomas to these winds and reported a high number of trouble calls about trees blown into power lines. Four American Eagle planes made emergency landings in the middle of the night of Jan. 15 at the Henry E. Rohlsen Airport after having been diverted from flight paths elsewhere in the northeastern Caribbean.
Seas have smoothed out in recent days, "but boy, are those ferry seats cold!" commented one commuter who typically wears a skirt and regularly catches the first boat out of Cruz Bay at 6 a.m. For those in the mountains on St. Thomas's North Side, there's been a similar shock on early morning trips to the bathroom. "This is why I left Chicago!" one longtime transplant wailed.
"It's been that way over the entire Eastern Caribbean," the National Weather Service's Laskosky said. He explained that the phenomenon was due to "a long-wave trough" bringing Arctic air into the region.
"There's a deep low-pressure system anchored over the northeastern United States that extends all the way to the Caribbean," he said recently. "And a series of short- wave troughs that have been developing off New England are making the long-wave trough deeper and deeper."
According to St. John's Henderson, "The unusual part was the organization of the front. The low that hit us was a solid six days — that's a very long front."
Laskosky said the San Juan station "receives reports from a number of volunteers in the Virgin Islands, sometimes e-mail, sometimes in the regular mail, several days old." However, he said, "no ongoing records are being kept."
The only written records he could find covered the period of 1951-1960 or, in some cases, to 1965. They reported temperatures on a monthly basis. Here are some of his findings within those time spans:
– The lowest figure he found for the territory was recorded at the former Anna's Hope Experiment Station on St. Croix. It was 49 degrees, identified as a 30-year record for January. From the same source he found a low of 52 recorded for February.
– For Charlotte Amalie, the January low of 65 for the period was recorded as the lowest in 37 years; the February low was 63. For the Harry S Truman Airport (now Cyril E. King), the FAA recorded a 12-year low of 63 for January, and lows of 65 for February and 64 for March.
– For Cruz Bay, a January reading of 59 was noted as a 14-year low; other lows were 60 for February and again 60 for March.
– For Alexander Hamilton Airport (now Henry E. Rohlsen), the FAA recorded lows of 61 for January, 62 for February and again 62 for March.
Nowadays, the airport automated observation systems, operated jointly by the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Weather Service, transmit temperature, air pressure, wind and rainfall data 24 hours a day to the San Juan station. There it is added to the pool of regional data that, in turn, is transferred by computer daily to the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.
"Every day, every station across the country dumps its data to this center for archiving," Laskosky said.
Repeated attempts to reach the NCDC records section by telephone connected with an automated system that ultimately led to a cut-off and busy signal. The center's web site (www.ncdc.noaa.gov) lists temperature extremes for the 50 states but not for the Virgin Islands and other territories.
Laskosky said the cold weather the region has been experiencing this year "is probably related to La Niña," the global system that has overtaken the global warming effects of El Niño over the last couple of years. La Niña "is a result of extremely cold water surfacing off the coast of Ecuador and Peru and in the Pacific," he said.
The Caribbean, of course, has been getting only a fringe effect. Last weekend, ice storms swept south to north on the U.S. mainland, from Alabama to the Carolinas, causing widespread power outages that left many homes without heat as well as power. Record snows followed, and more ice storms are predicted for the weekend to come.
Meantime, California has been experiencing an unusual winter drought, Laskosky said. And St. Thomas resident Michael Friebus, who has family in Johannesburg, South Africa, said the current summer season there (seasons are reversed in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres) has brought both extremely high temperatures and severe drought.
With regard to the Caribbean chill, Laskosky said a few days ago, "I don't see it being changed any time in th
e next week." As Virgin Islanders know, weather forecasting is an inexact science. But the cold snap seems to have snapped, for the territory, at least.

Don't bother trying to find out what the official low temperature was in the Virgin Islands on any particularly chilly night in the last couple of weeks. The answer is the same, no matter what the date: There wasn't any.
That's because "there is no official climatic data recording station in the Virgin Islands," explained Henry Laskosky, lead forecaster with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in San Juan.
At the St. Thomas and St. Croix airports, automated observation systems record temperatures and other weather data for transmission to the NOAA station in San Juan. However, hardly anybody spends their nights at an airport, and the temperatures there, at or near sea level, are likely to be significantly higher than than those at the higher elevations where most people live.
But unofficially, there's no question: It has been bone-chilling cold lately, even for January, in the American Paradise.
Naturalist Will Henderson, who lives on St. John's Bordeaux Mountain , has been keeping his own records for years. This month, he recorded lows of 62 on Jan. 17 and 18, and of 63 on Jan. 16, 19 and 20. "Normally, I'm five degrees lower than sea level," he said. His home is about 1,000 feet up, "and that corresponds to what they normally cite as one degree per 200 feet of elevation."
He suggested that "it is probably more significant that the daily highs dropped down" for that period. He recorded maximums of just 69 degrees for Jan. 16, 17 and 19.
Henderson also cited the winds during that period. "Up on the mountain, it was roaring," he said. "My anemometer [a device to measure wind speed] blew away, and I haven't replaced it."
On St. Croix, Sally Lawaetz, whose late mother-in-law collected weather data for NOAA for many years, said the thermometer at her home on the island's West End "has gotten down to 62, with a couple days of 63 and 64" this month. That's nowhere near a record, though, she said.
"We had 54 degrees once, about 20 years ago," she recalled. "You could see your breath. It was delightful!"
Family patriarch Fritz Lawaetz recalled that once the thermometer at his property showed a sudden drop to 41 — the same day hail was reported on St. Croix. "But that was just a fluke that quickly passed," he said.
Atop St. Thomas's Crown Mountain, farmer Michael Bryan is still "wearing long-sleeved shirts to work every morning," his wife, Tracey, said. There's no thermometer up there, she said, but "this is the coldest it's been in a very long time." Fortunately, she added, "the chickens have thick feathers."
Edie P. Johnson, who lives in upper Contant on St. Thomas, said the thermometer outside one of her windows showed the temperature in the mid-60s one recent night, "but the wind chill factor was in the 50s."
Over the Martin Luther King Day weekend, Jan. 14-17, in addition to experiencing plummeting temperatures, the whole territory was buffeted by high and howling winds. The Water And Power Authority attributed a series of outages on St. Croix and St. Thomas to these winds and reported a high number of trouble calls about trees blown into power lines. Four American Eagle planes made emergency landings in the middle of the night of Jan. 15 at the Henry E. Rohlsen Airport after having been diverted from flight paths elsewhere in the northeastern Caribbean.
The weather has been chilly over the entire Eastern Caribbean, the National Weather Service's Laskosky said. He explained that the phenomenon was due to "a long-wave trough" bringing Arctic air into the region.
"There's a deep low-pressure system anchored over the northeastern United States that extends all the way to the Caribbean," he said recently. "And a series of short- wave troughs that have been developing off New England are making the long-wave trough deeper and deeper."
According to St. John's Henderson, "The unusual part was the organization of the front. The low that hit us was a solid six days — that's a very long front."
Laskosky said the San Juan station "receives reports from a number of volunteers in the Virgin Islands, sometimes e-mail, sometimes in the regular mail, several days old." However, he said, "no ongoing records are being kept." The only written records he could find covered the period of 1951-1960 or, in some cases, to 1965. They reported temperatures on a monthly basis. Here are some of his findings within those time spans:
– The lowest figure he found for the territory was recorded at the former Anna's Hope Experiment Station on St. Croix. It was 49 degrees, identified as a 30-year record for January. From the same source he found a low of 52 recorded for February.
– For Charlotte Amalie, the January low of 65 for the period was recorded as the lowest in 37 years; the February low was 63. For the Harry S Truman Airport (now Cyril E. King), the FAA recorded a 12-year low of 63 for January, and lows of 65 for February and 64 for March.
– For Cruz Bay, a January reading of 59 was noted as a 14-year low; other lows were 60 for February and again 60 for March.
– For Alexander Hamilton Airport (now Henry E. Rohlsen), the Federal Aviation Administration recorded lows of 61 for January, 62 for February and again 62 for March.
Nowadays, the airport automated-observation systems, operated jointly by the FAA and the National Weather Service, transmit temperature, air pressure, wind and rainfall data 24 hours a day to the San Juan station. There it is added to the pool of regional data that, in turn, is transferred by computer daily to the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. "Every day, every station across the country dumps its data to this center for archiving," Laskosky said.
Repeated attempts to reach the NCDC records section by telephone connected with an automated system that ultimately led to a cut-off and busy signal. The center's web site (www.ncdc.noaa.gov) lists temperature extremes for the 50 states but not for the Virgin Islands and other territories.
Laskosky said the cold weather the region has been experiencing this year "is probably related to La Niña," the global system that has overtaken the global warming effects of El Niño over the last couple of years. La Niña "is a result of extremely cold water surfacing off the coast of Ecuador and Peru and in the Pacific," he said.
The Caribbean, of course, has been getting only a fringe effect. Last weekend, ice storms swept south to north on the U.S. mainland, from Alabama to the Carolinas, causing widespread power outages that left many homes without heat as well as power. Record snows followed, and more ice storms are predicted for the weekend to come.
Meantime, California has been experiencing an unusual winter drought, Laskosky said. And St. Thomas resident Michael Friebus, who has family in Johannesburg, South Africa, said the current summer season there (seasons are reversed in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres) has brought both extremely high temperatures and severe drought.
With regard to the Caribbean chill, Laskosky said a few days ago, "I don't see it being changed any time in the next week." As Virgin Islanders know, weather forecasting is an inexact science. The cold snap seems to have snapped, for the territory, at least.

How does former Presiding Judge Verne Hodge's request for $400,000 in accumulated leave compare with payments to other judges who retired under the same generous legislation?
Presiding Judge Maria Cabret has asked for legal advice on whether she can release those figures, according to attorney Glenda Lake, Territorial Court administrator. Cabret has referred a request for that information to the court's attorney, Leon Kendall.
Meanwhile one of the former judges, Eileen Petersen, told St. Thomas Source she could not remember exactly how much she received, but she put the figure at something over $10,000 and well under $100,000. Petersen retired in 1992 after 21 years on the bench (although she said she volunteered unpaid at the court until 1994.)
Her tenure is the longest next to Hodge's. He served for 23 years.
Only judges sitting at the time of the 1976 law, now repealed, were eligible for unrestricted lump-sum payments for unused annual and sick leave at the time of retirement. Besides Petersen and Hodge they were Henry Feuerzeig, Raymond Finch, and Antoine Joseph and Irwin Silverlight, both now deceased.
Judge Henry Smock was not covered by the legislation, as earlier reported.
Only those judges with 20 years or more on the bench were eligible to retire at full salary, Lake said.
Pensions for judges now on the bench are capped at $65,000, she said, "a sort of injustice." Most are eligible for less, since they may serve only one or two six-year terms.
There was no word Tuesday on whether the government will pay Hodge. As St. Thomas Source reported Saturday, Finance Commissioner Bernice Turnbull has asked Attorney General Iver Stridiron to research the question of sick leave pay. He said he would probably send his findings to her in about a week.

After Public Works chief engineer Aloy Nielsen took a recent ride along Bordeaux Mountain Road, he readily agreed with area residents that traversing some sections is a harrowing experience.
"I can still see his eyeballs!" St. John's deputy Public Works commissioner, Ira Wade, said Monday.
And with that assessment in hand, the two officials said Monday they will begin work on Thursday to relieve the hazardous conditions along the road.
At a recent public hearing, more than half a dozen Bordeaux residents testified that the recent rains in the aftermath of two fall hurricanes have turned their daily drive along Route 108 into a harrowing experience.
Wade said he invited the department's chief road engineer to tour the area last week. "I gave him the scenic tour throughout the entire road," Wade said.
At the Jan. 12 hearing, residents told government officials that the unpaved road, a federally designate route, had deteriorated to the point where motorists had to drive close to steep embankments to avoid rocky outcrops and ponds of pooled rainwater. Traffic could move in only one direction at a time in some places, they said.
Nielsen confirmed that his trip along the road was an eye-opening experience. His instant assessment: "There's a couple of sections that's real bad. The entire road needs regrading. . . It's that way because it's eroded, and you've got some sections where you're worried your tire's going to slip."
On Thursday, Public Works crews are scheduled to bulldoze the road to remove embedded boulders that have been exposed by extensive soil erosion, Nielsen said. After that, Wade and his workers will attempt improve the roadway by re-grading.
"I think that will be a big help right away," Nielsen said. He added that more short-term improvements for Bordeaux Road may be included in the upcoming federal highway project for South Shore Road, Route 107, that runs along the Coral Bay coast. He said those improvements will focus on controlling erosion through the installation of culverts that will allow rainwater to be channeled off so that it doesn't erode the soil.
However, he said, the work will probably not begin until next summer, when Phase 2 of the Route 107 road project is scheduled to begin. And before any plans can be made, he added, it will be up to Public Works Commissioner Harold Thompson Jr. to reprogram a portion of the Federal Highway Administration funds earmarked for the Route 107 project.
Nielsen pledged to do as much as possible given the limited resources and the great need for road repairs on the eastern end of St. John. "Bordeaux Mountain Road is a very long road," he noted. "Due to the terrain, it is not a cheap road to do anything with. We're talking some good bucks."

The governor’s lack of support is not deterring Sen. Alicia "Chucky" Hansen and attorney Amelia Joseph from pressing their battle against the National Park Service for title to property in downtown Christiansted.
"The local government owns that property," Joseph said on WSTX Tuesday. "I’m so sure of this I’d bet my left foot."
The Park Service began work in September to turn a 12-space downtown parking lot into a park, contending that i was within its rights because the property is part of the Christiansted National Historic Site.
Hansen and Joseph, however, disagreed. They argued that the land belongs to the V.I. government. They filed suit in U.S. District Court and were granted a temporary restraining order in order to prove that the local government indeed held title to Fort Christiansvaern, the Scale House, Customs House and Steeple Building.
But a few days after granting the restraining order a District Court judge reversed his decision, noting that only the governor can take legal action on behalf of the territory. The judge questioned whether Hansen, acting as a private citizen, had standing in the case.
However, he gave Hansen and Joseph until Nov. 1 to prove ownership and convince Gov. Charles Turnbull to join the suit.
The governor refused, but Joseph said Tuesday that the case wasn’t closed. Reiterating her belief that the property belongs to the V.I. government, she said she was continuing with the suit without Turnbull. This time the tactic will be to force the governor to join the fray by filing a taxpayer's lawsuit.
"The taxpayers in the Virgin Islands can file suit if the government is wasting money or giving away real property," Joseph said. "The property is priceless. It’s our property – local Virgin Islanders'."
Meanwhile, the Park Service has almost finished turning the asphalt area between the Scale House and the wall surrounding the Post Office into a 4,200-square-foot lawn, with an information kiosk, benches and palm trees.
The $150,000 project would complete the Park Service’s controversial move of April 1998 that turned the 70-space King’s Wharf lot into a grassy park. That project spurred protests from former Gov. Roy Schneider, who also claimed the V.I. government owned the property.
He later backed off those claims. But Hansen and Joseph say the Park Service’s claims to the property haven’t been proved.
"If they have proof they own the property, why not share it?" Joseph asked.
Both Hansen and Schneider argued that downtown businesses would be hurt by the lack of parking. Christiansted National Historic Site Superintendent Joel Tutein, however, argued that most of the parking at the King’s Wharf lot was being used by employees and business owners.

The Casino Control Commission caught up with months of work Tuesday in its first full meeting since July.
The session was the first for Lloyd McAlpin, a new commissioner who filled the seat vacated by Dennis Brow last July. Since that time commission members Eileen Petersen and Imelda Dizon have lacked quorum and have not been able to act on items before them.
But despite the regained abilities of the commission, Petersen lamented that legislation amending the Casino Control Act to create a casino control revolving fund hasn’t been implemented by the Department of Finance.
The fund is needed so that the Division of Gaming Enforcement can, in the short term, pay a vendor to test 300 slot machines before the Divi Carina Bay Resort and Casino opens sometime in March. Petersen noted that licensing fees for the machines have already been paid by the casino but said the fund is needed in order to write checks.
"We are urgently awaiting word" about the fund, Petersen said. "It is imperative we have the funds to test the slot machines."
Oliver David, director of gaming enforcement, said his office is negotiating with a "highly regarded" off-island company with expertise in testing slot machines. He said a contract could be completed in the next two weeks.
But without money, the testing won’t start and, once again, the opening of the casino looms in the future.
"Without the machines being tested, they can’t be operated at the casino," he said.
Petersen, meanwhile, said she will continue to call Finance Commissioner Bernice Turnbull to have the fund established.
"I’ve been calling her every day," Petersen said. "And I will continue to do so."
In other board action, McAlpin reported that the Department of Labor has issued 155 work permits for the Divi Carina Bay Resort and Casino. He said 128, or 83 percent, of them went to bonafide Virgin Islanders. A bonafide resident is a person born in the territory or someone who has lived here for five years or more.
The Casino Control Act mandates that after the end of a casino resort’s first year, 65 percent of its employees must be local residents.