Without question, the sale of the V.I. Water and Power Authority should have been put out for bid. In a perfect world the government would have submitted a request for proposals, all interested companies would have bid and WAPA – or a part of it – would have gone to the company that offered the best deal.
But since that is not what happened, we have to deal with the current reality.
Southern Energy has been negotiating with the V.I. government for nearly a year. During that time no other utility company has come forward with an alternate proposal. There was nothing to prevent that, so an argument can be made that no other firm was really interested — or not sufficiently interested to put forward a better package than Southern’s.
Further, the company hired by the Senate to review the deal, Arthur D. Little, found little wrong with it, other than the absence of a competitive bidding process.
So, though we may not like the way the deal has been done — and we don’t — we are, in our view, too far down the road with way too much at stake to turn back now.
It is time to begin privatizing many government services and agencies, and this is the place to start.
We are particularly troubled, as we listen to many of the arguments against the Southern deal, by the way we treat large national and international companies interested in investing in the Virgin Islands: We treat them like the enemy instead of as a partner who wants to see the territory grow and flourish – something that is to our advantage as well as theirs.
Look at how we treated Beal Aerospace, which after endless months of insult and abuse, finally picked up its marbles and went elsewhere. Look at how we treated AT&T over the mud spill in St. Croix. We tried to balance the budget on the backs of this corporation by trying to levy an unprecedented fine of some $20 million against them. And guess what? AT&T of the Virgin Islands is trying to sell its assets. AT&T, too, is trying to get out of here, as is Chase Manhattan Bank, which will likely become a locally owned company, leaving the territory with no major national or international banks.
If we slam the door on yet-another major U.S. company — one that could attract other investors, improve our infrastructure and provide this territory with a stable power supply — how many more times will other investors want to waste their time and money trying to invest in the Virgin Islands?
We are rapidly developing a very bad reputation as a business-hostile environment. When we drive Southern away, then what?
We are reminded of the guy on the roof in the flood who keeps waiting for God to save him. First a boat tries to rescue him, then a helicopter, but he keeps waiting for God. When he finally drowns and goes to Heaven, he asks God what happened. God replies, "I sent you a boat and a helicopter."
