Editor’s Note: This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and readability.
Listen to the full interview here. Listen time 46 mins.
Gov. Albert Bryan Jr. delivered his seventh State of the Territory address Monday. On Thursday, he sat down with the Source to discuss immigration, health care, the whirlwind of developments in Washington D.C. and their potential impact on the territory and more.
Governor, thank you so much for making the time today. I’m glad that you were talking about the OMB memo that came out [prior to the interview] — the federal OMB memo — and the funding freeze that sent a lot of… raised a lot of alarms here in the territory and everywhere else, I think to some extent, a lot of what we talk about in terms of what’s happening in D.C. could just be old news by the time this publishes tomorrow. So I think I’d rather focus on our efforts in Washington. Obviously, we have a Delegate to Congress, and we also have a consultant firm that we contracted to advance our agenda. So let’s start there. How much have we paid [lobbyists] Squire Patton Boggs, and what is the territory’s return on investment?
I don’t know how much we’ve paid Squire Patton Boggs, but let’s say we’re paying $2 million a year, if that, right? We got a billion dollars for COVID. I mean, you could watch the PFA meetings — you know, we have a board member that always complains about how much we pay lobbyists — just the 10 percent to 2 percent that we had, the [adjustment to the cost-share] match, that’s like $2 billion.
COVID, we got a billion dollars. You know, our efforts in D.C. have been astronomical. We’ve got the match from — it’s now 17 percent to 83, it was 41 to 59 — for Medicaid, we got a reimbursement now on the Earned Income Tax Credit. I mean, these are things we are working on for years, so — worth every single penny. If we were paying $20 million a year, it would still be worth it. And the good thing about our D.C. lobbyists: we have ‘em on both sides. We have Republican and we have Democrats. So we go and talk to both parties. We don’t, we don’t carry our party flag to D.C. We — I’m about Virgin Islanders. I’m a Democrat, but you know, the fate of the people in our territory and where we go is way more important. So we got a lot of Republican friends.
Regardless of which [side] of the aisle that you’re working on, if Congress is not moving or doesn’t have the appetite to move certain things — I’m thinking, you know, like the rum cover over extension, how do we then proceed to get some of these things off the ground?
Well, I mean, for D.C., my — our — D.C. agenda has really shrunk. Like I said, we got a lot of things done in this administration that were pending for decades. Right now, the rum cover is our biggest issue, and we already have challenges, I would say, — just to be real — is because we… let’s put it this way: the Virgin Islands hasn’t been represented really well in D.C. on the Republican side. So the Republicans have some axe to grind and they’re not being shy about telling me about it, so we’re working through those difficult conversations and trying to get what we need to get.
So it’s going to be tricky, but we’re pretty confident. Our relationship with [Governor of Puerto Rico] Jenniffer González — the delegate has a good relationship with her too — she’s a Republican. She is a Trump supporter. She’s the governor of Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico needs a rum cover over as well. So if they do it for them, they got to do it for us. So we feel confident, but I’m not taking any chances, because it really makes me nervous, I have to say.
I’ll be in D.C. the weekend of [Feb.] 21, or the week of the 21st of this month for the National Governors Association. We will get to see the president on that trip, and we’ll try to talk with some other people too. We are looking at some new lobbyists that are squarely in the Trump camp to try to secure the stuff that we have or that we want in D.C. The other issues — tax issues, immigration is still high on there — the delegate is helping us with that. There’s going to be firm resistance to anything that comes out of that office from the Republicans, but we’re hoping that we could get over some of those things and be able to get some love from the Republican side of the aisle.
Let’s talk about immigration. The last administration didn’t have — didn’t seem to be particularly interested in anything like a visa waiver. Labor Commissioner [Gary] Molloy told the Source back in March that we needed about 7,000 workers to complete the construction problems — projects, sorry, Freudian slip, sorry — projects that we have coming online. Where does that workforce come from?
It could come from a variety of places. I know right now — the Virgin Islands had asked Congress to pass a law prohibiting H-1B visas for anything except entertainment and sports. This was probably back in the ‘70s… We just discovered this because we had an independent agent trying to do some mass recruiting out of South America, that there is a prohibition against the Virgin Islands. So we gotta get that changed, number one. And then I think the bluster of the initial changes in the administration will dull out. Once we see the full impact of what really strong anti-immigration policy does, we’re going to have to make some deals, and hopefully one of those deals would be with our South American neighbors — allowing skilled workers to come into the United States and the U.S. Virgin Islands to do work.
They’re already here. We got a lot of Colombians and Venezuelans in our community doing construction work. We just need more. And then the likelihood — remember, this is a 10-, 15-year operation. It’s not like he needs 7,000 workers today. So what’s going to happen is America will have a recession within the next five years, and when that economy dips, the power of our federal dollars will essentially inure, make us immune to fluctuations in the economy, because you have so much money coming in all the time in construction, it would affect our tourism product, but not our construction product. So when that happens, we expect to see more workers come through as well, too.
It’s a little strange to be almost counting on a national recession to provide an influx of workers to…
Imagine that. Yeah, I was hoping that — we got the recession scare, and I was kind of hoping that we would get a little bit of a recession so we could — because usually Virgin Islanders come home as well, too, when that happens. The other thing I think is going to be significant is, I think we’ll get the refinery restarted again, and that’s going to create a lot of new workers coming to the Virgin Islands. And a lot of that labor, [is] going to be skilled labor, but a lot of that labor is going to be general labor. So it’s going to help, especially St. Croix, once they get a refinery, because they’re going to have to do some turn around on the refinery before they get it started. Those workers, when they come here, could also help and join the recovery to do the bigger projects, like the hospitals and a lot of the schools that we’re going to have underway.
Yes sir, and you cited some specific figures about what that would, a refinery restart would do for our economy, and I think you mentioned 400 jobs. How many of those are jobs for Virgin Islanders, and how many are these skilled workers who would be coming in for the restart?
Well the 400 jobs… if you look at the plan, the [Vision 2040], was to increase the population. We’ve lost 20 percent of our population. So whether they’re Virgin Islanders’ jobs or they’re foreign labor jobs — meaning foreign labor from the Eastern Caribbean or from the United States mainland, or from Haiti or Santo Domingo — isn’t really the question. We just need people. So Virgin Islanders… everything I do now is about getting people to get prepared for this massive change.
Up skill — get your education, get a new skill set, open a business, invest in a piece of property, a commercial, a land, because the tsunami of inflation that comes with it is going to be crippling. We’ve seen it happen before in the ‘70s, with a massive population growth, with the advent of all the stuff that our forefathers did before — oil, alumina, watches, textiles, pharmaceuticals — is going to happen again through construction. So if we get ready, Virgin Islanders will be able to take care, take advantage of this. But if they don’t, there’s going to be people coming from other places who are going to get the benefit of it. So I’m not so concerned about who those jobs are. I am concerned that we’ll have people to do the work, which will add to the income tax and other taxes that will help the government do the things it needs to do.
But this relies on the refinery restarting, and that’s something that seems like it’s been perpetually on the horizon, at least for the entire time I’ve lived in the territory. What —
But remember, the refinery started, and in order to get the refinery started, I had to… act as an intermediary and call the Trump people, right, who forced the rank and file EPA people to come to some reasonable agreement, and that’s how we got the refinery on.
When Biden came back to office, of course, we had the upset at the refinery. I called the refinery and told them, “Listen, shut it down.” The EPA then called them and said, “Oh, you have a mandatory shutdown.”
They never really shut the refinery down. It was already down when they made that edict. But Biden is gone, and Trump is in.… The only thing I could characterize: the EPA director under the Biden [administration] is as a terrorist. I mean, he was just unreasonable in terms of what they’re trying to do to us. And they told us clearly: they don’t care about our economy. All they care about is their mandate by the EPA. And that is really victimization of a society.
There’s the economic impact of that, and that edict from the EPA, but how do you then balance the legitimate safety and environmental concerns that Virgin Islanders do have about the refinery opening?
I think it’s a reasonable balance, and that’s not what we’re asking for, because even in the speech, I emphasized a safe restart of the refinery, but they are strategically creating hurdles that will cripple the refinery. Like the EPA was sending out memos — even when we’re looking at refinancing and getting the refinery sold when it was in bankruptcy — sending out memos that would short-change any reasonable bidder coming in, creating an atmosphere where investors wouldn’t put any money in because they the EPA constantly is saying, “you’ll never get a permit.”
They don’t say so directly, but the timing of which they do what they did, and then when… because remember, now we have a totally new owner for the refinery, right? They’re still holding them accountable for what the last owner did. So why not, let’s, we’re restarting. Let’s reset. They said, “We really want to do that.”
Let’s put a reasonable timeline in order for the flare gas recovery system to be put in, and then a reasonable amount of support behind it, and the refinery to start safely.
Instead, what they’re doing is creating timelines that there’s no way they could be able to finance what they need to do and do it. Because remember, the refinery was human error. When they looked at the report or why they had the release, it was human error. It wasn’t anything with the machinery or equipment. Human error. So that is a result of not having a trained workforce — well, I should say trained enough workforce,a younger workforce than what they had before. So one of the commitments of the new owner is to make sure we bring back some of the people who’ve been there before, who know the refinery, so we could have a safe startup and a safe operation.
I’ll ask one more question about the refinery, but I feel like there was a sort of contradiction in terms there. There was the part where the errors had, there was the “result of human error,” and then you’re also talking about bringing back the people who were there before, who know the refinery, so….
Before the refinery closed in 2012 — not the people who were there who had the human error.
Just wanted to be clear about that.
Thank you.
That is something that I think people would raise their eyebrows at.
Yeah, I think…everywhere I worked, working for Leon Hess in the… refinery was the best working experience I’ve ever had in terms of efficiency in terms of responsibility, and in terms of safety. That’s where I came out of college and learned my work ethic. And you could eat off the ground in there. When you dismantle a work ethic like that, it’s very hard to rebuild that culture again. And that’s where the restart was suffering. A lot of these guys are retired. Up to today, I was speaking with a gentleman, and he was telling me his question is, “When are you going to get the refinery open so I could come home,” because they’re working in refineries in Canada, Louisiana, Texas, all over the place. So a lot of people want to come home.
I’d like to move on to health care in the territory. I know there’s been a lot of discussion about hospitals, but additionally, 17,000 Virgin Islanders, more or less, lost Medicaid last summer when that expansion lapsed — or, not lapsed — but they were spun off Medicaid. This territory still lacks a lot of mental health infrastructure. Sen. Ray Fonseca, who chairs the Senate Health Committee, has been calling for a state of emergency over hospitals for a while. There’s —
Well, you know, I laugh. Imagine a senator calling for a state of emergency after the Senate voted to not allow the governor of the Virgin Islands to touch any of the Epstein money in a state — for any reason — even in a state of emergency. You know, I think what he’s saying is there needs to be concern, alarm, but a state of emergency is a declaration that would allow me to use any existing funding to help the situation.
But the reality of it is, is the Virgin Islands is already housing people. Up to yesterday, right where you’re sitting, Wynnie Testamark, who is the director of the Bureau of Corrections, was telling me: we have some people who are incarcerated because they can’t stand trial due to their mental illness, or they’re not guilty by reason of insanity, that we could return to the territory that they stabilized, that they have them on medication. We do have a mental health program at the correction center — the John Bell Correction Center here in St. Croix that we could start to re-place these people.
This one individual is $20,000 a month we pay. And we have several individuals like that. We have like… 79 people that we pay $9 million for, something around there. Don’t quote me on it exactly, I can get you the exact number later, but somewhere in that ballpark that we spend every year.
And we had a sit down about, okay, how do we repatriate these mental health patients to the territory. And they have different types of maladies, mental health illnesses, and all of them can’t be served in the same facility. So at this point, it’s cheaper for us to keep them away.
Secondly, you know, we need to grow up in the Virgin Islands and realize that we can’t have everything in St. Thomas and St. Croix. We can’t have two mental health facilities. We can’t afford it. You know, everything is cheaper in St. Croix. It’s cheaper to do it in St. Croix.
But the reality is, we have [the Eldra Schulterbrandt Mental Health Facility] right now that we’re trying to repair, and we’re in the process of purchasing Sea View, that we want to use for multi-purpose elder care, mental health and youth rehabilitation.
So we’re doing things, but, I mean, we still continue — we have one psychologist. Dr. Sang is doing her best to serve everybody, and getting people here and attracting them has been incredibly difficult. It’s not a Virgin Islands problem, it’s a national problem. So we’ll continue to do what we can around mental health, but it’s no easy road, and it costs us a lot of money to house people off island but that’s what we have to do.
You mentioned that a lot of what the senator was doing was about raising alarm. Is there a sense of alarm within your administration about the state of our mental health capacity and our ability to provide health care?
I think, yeah, there’s always been an alarm. I think we don’t do ourselves justice when we talk about the people that work in our hospitals and our health care system. You know, we went through the whole of COVID and when hospitals in the states were overflowing and packing dead bodies in trailers, we didn’t have that situation.
The second thing I wanted to say, people compare the Virgin Islands’ hospitals with Cleveland Clinic. There’s no comparison. You can’t compare a rural hospital with a metropolitan, multi-state hospital. I think our hospital does really good, and no one wants to recognize that all these gunshot victims, all the immigrants that get hurt, all the babies that are born, for people who don’t have health insurance, we take care of it.
Like you mentioned, we took 17,000 people off of [Medicaid]. You know what that means? They don’t get preventative care, but they still get care, because if you get sick in the Virgin Islands, we got to take care of you. We got to pay.
Everybody gets on Facebook, social media, and comments about how bad the mental health or how the hospital… but nobody’s willing to pay one dollar more in order to secure it. So I think our health care system is growing in the right direction. We’re trying our best to create the systems that are going to allow us to do — but health care has always been an issue, and I don’t think there’ll be a day in the Virgin Islands history where it’s not a priority. Mental Health, we’ll continue to work with it, and we’re working at the school level too, trying to help kids at the school level deal with all the situations that we have. But I go to Washington D.C. and the amount of people I see with behavioral health problems living in tents — I don’t think it’s any different than anywhere else in America.
Thank you. And I’d like to devote a fair amount of time to the Code of Conduct that you announced during the State of the Territory. Is it fair to say that that was in response to, or in the wake of, indictments against three former members of your Cabinet?
I could say so, because… I never thought that I’d be dealing with corruption — or allegations of corruption, I should say — on this level. In the Turnbull administration, we had a lot of people go to jail, a lot, you know, couple people go to jail, high officials. And in the deJongh administration, I thought we wiped out any hint of that.
But…one of my colleagues pointed out to me, he said, “You notice there are only corruption cases when there’s a lot of money.” We’ve been broke for years. There’s a lot of money in the Virgin Islands now going around, and you can’t make up people’s mind, you know, about what they want to do. That’s the one thing you can’t legislate. So no, I didn’t think I would have to mess with it, but…
We had the legislation… that Sen. [Kenneth] Gittens had put up, but my biggest thing about that is: I want people to be aware of what they’re up against and what the rules are, because when the rules aren’t clear, you could arrest people very easily, especially if they don’t understand what they’re doing.
So our education of people with our program, through [the V.I. Division of] Personnel and our Code of Conduct by the governor is about protecting individuals and making sure they know what their rights are and what they’re supposed to be doing in order to be a government employee, and protecting the finances and assets of the government of the Virgin Islands.
So we do have laws that guard against conflicts of interest in… parts of the government, we have a Whistleblowers Protection Act — the same day that you unveiled the executive order, the Code of Conduct, the government filed a pretty scathing response to a former HFA executive who had filed a whistleblower complaint against the agency. She’d alleged, basically, improper contracting, processing, things like that.
I’m laughing because people, when they get fired, they always have so much to say. They never have this, nothing to say when they working, right? So that’s in litigation. I don’t want to comment on that, but if you follow the trail — the RT Park, the guy Peter [Chapman, former executive director of the University of the Virgin Islands Research and Technology Park], now he’s suing the Virgin Islands government too. It’s like you get dismissed, you find an attorney and you shake down the government so you could get some money.
I mean, that’s the MO, right? I mean, maybe there’s something there. I mean, maybe there’s fire where there’s smoke, but how come you wasn’t whistle-blowing when you were an employee? Why didn’t you request a meeting to say this is going on?
Sorry about that, Governor. So we were discussing whistleblowers and whistleblowing more generally — I’m aware of at least three such suits in the past year that speak to HFA, the RT Park, as you mentioned, and one about WAPA and its water lab —
All people who have been terminated. I’ll let the record speak for itself.
Great. With the Code of Conduct, you’ve said what you, how you feel about those specific lawsuits, but how should and why should Virgin Islanders feel confident about corruption or fraud or abuse being prevented in the government, given that we already had laws and safeguards in place to prevent them?
This is six years I’m in office. So we’ve gone through at least $6 billion worth of transactions. There’s 6,000 points of failure for me, because there’s 6,000 people that work for the government, and probably 10,000 in all. And we have, in my tenure, from all I know, I’d say, we have 20 allegations of — I’m talking about all government employees now —20 allegations.
It’s 20 too much, but when you look at the amount of transactions that we do every day, it’s a pretty impressive record. Still, I’m not saying there’s no corruption, right? But massive corruption through our government? I don’t think so.
I mean, like I said, there’s never been a time when there’s been a more transparent government. I remember when the Daily News used to harass John deJongh and his administration for the employee listing of who’s making what. Now you could look at it at your fingertips. You could look at any invoice in the government, any vendor. You could see how much money they made… and it’s made it easier for us, too, to pinpoint things. I got some stuff that is coming down the pipe that I can’t talk about, that are irregular, so, I don’t know. I think we live in a time now where there’s enough money in the economy for people who want to do work. People always taking advantage to do some things, but…
I do want to push back on a couple of those assertions, as someone who’s long tried to find certain contracts and things. The Property and Procurement Department is not always up-to-date — or, I would say, diligent about uploading the documentation. The transparency website is also frequently months out of date, and that makes it very difficult to actually use for news-gathering purposes.
But it never used to have [anything] before. That’s my point, though. And you know, as much scrutiny as the press gives the central government, the Legislature is supposed to have a transparency website as well. We’ve never seen it. We’ve never seen the transactions go on through the Legislature — or the court.
So government is — or Port Authority, Waste Management, or anywhere central government — the part that I’m mainly in charge of, you could at least go and check. We transitioned from one transparency company to the other that was doing the work — they ain’t a transparency company, but it was a software company — I preferred the older one. We’ve been having a lot of problems with the new one, to your point. But you could look. I don’t think they upload contracts… you can see the purchase order, but you can’t see the individual contracts.
A number of them are uploaded online, when the website works or when the web vendor has been paid and the website is, you know….
I didn’t even know that, but… there’s nothing to hide, though. I mean, what would you see in a contract? What would be there to hide? I mean, we try to make it so autonomous. When we’re doing contracts, we try to take people out who don’t have any decision making processes. Majority [of] people is Property and Procurement, but everybody have a friend of a friend of a friend,you know what I’m saying? I may not put my hand on the scale, but I can’t guarantee — 6,000 people in the government — that somebody’s not putting their hand on the scale to dip to somebody for a contract.
Sure and earlier you mentioned that you know someone in your office, or mentioned that these things — these issues — tend to come up when the Virgin Islands has a lot of money coming through. Is it also safe to say that we’re in a time where, with our disaster recovery, we really need things to move fairly quickly, and is that another instance where….
No, I personally think we’re moving exponentially fast given the constraints of being on an island — limited resources, four percent unemployment.
I mean, when you think about — the collective bonding power of all the contractors in the Virgin Islands couldn’t bond the hospital. None of our contractors in the Virgin Islands could put up a bond to bond the school. They had to come [from] outside. And even the bigger contractors are having problems bonding for the jobs in the Virgin Islands. So I don’t think people understand the complexity of these projects.
It can’t move faster. It’s like having a very powerful engine on your car without wheels. You just don’t have the people to do it. I asked a contractor the other day, I said, “What’s stopping you from doing a 200-house development?” And he says, “Governor… five years ago, I could put out a job for a project manager, and I would get 20 applications — 19 of them good and hireable.”
He says, “Now I get five applications, and I know all five people already, and they’re not good.”
So the demand for labor debilitates us, because the demand for labor is so high, the cost of construction is high. So what we used to get for just like, a simple wall, is a million dollars. What’s a good example — these Head Start centers that we built in — you see the one in St. John? Did you go over there to see that?
I didn’t get over there [for it].
You ever see the one in Bolongo, the one that we building? That thing is like $6 million. I mean, that’s what it costs.
We just had a story about the [Arthur A. Richards School]. The school is up to $264 million for a K-8 school. And just to put that in perspective: Good Hope School is $1.8 million to buy, and a new school is $264 million. But it’s the complexity of the construction, the gym, the pool, the thickness of the walls to withstand hurricanes and earthquakes and tsunamis —because we’re in all three zones — it just costs.
I understand and I know you’ve spoken about it quite a bit in interviews this week —
No no no, I like repeating myself, because people don’t hear —
People don’t read everything. But I do want to stay on the subject of, I guess, propriety in government — and especially in this climate, or in the shadow of these indictments. Last year, in the summer — late spring, early summer of 2023 — I think a lot of lawmakers were pretty aghast when they learned that there was a $45 million General Fund payment that they did not authorize that was used to — it was the first payment made to Vitol. So my question: who authorized that payment?
I did.
And did you have legal authority to do that?
I thought I did.
Based on what?
Based on the fact that we would have lost the whole deal and we wouldn’t have been able to pay off Vitol.
I don’t think anyone disputed the urgency of that payment —
Right.
— but they just, the legality was in question.
Well we could take it to court.
Whether or not the Legislature has [the] appetite to take it to court —
Well then, I mean, it was paid back, right? I didn’t put it in my pocket. It was for the benefit of the Virgin Islands. And any time a situation exists that’s going to put the benefit of the Virgin Islands, for the people in jeopardy, I have that authority as governor of the Virgin Islands. So if we lost the deal, they would have cut off the propane. We wouldn’t have been able to pay for oil, and we’d have been in darkness.
Certainly and again, I don’t think anyone disputed the urgency, the need to make that —
But once, I mean . . . that’s a priority of the governor. I mean, you could read the Organic Act. I had to show the senators themselves, it’s like: the law gives me… the right to act in the best interest of the public, if an emergency situation can be created.
But then why bring that, the situation, to the Legislature at the eleventh hour and say, “We really need this?”
Because I like to do things the right way. There’s so many things that I could do. It’s like, let’s go back to the whole state of emergency. You know, we didn’t have to do that. Nine months before I asked them to do things that would have allowed us to totally avoid that and save Virgin Islands taxpayers millions of dollars. But they hem and they haw and they take too much time.
People thought that I wanted to declare a WAPA emergency so I could put my chief of staff in place. I didn’t make the pick. They went through — I didn’t bypass the procurement system. I didn’t push anybody in WAPA to make — Up to now, they still have vacancies I could have filled. I didn’t do it. I still let the board make all the decisions.
So, you know, it’s ludicrous when these people make these statements. It’s in the best interest of the Virgin Islands. And anytime it comes down to waiting for the Legislature and making the decision that’s in the best interest of the Virgin Islands, I’m gonna — the best interest of the Virgin Islands gonna win every single time.
And I say that unapologetically, because — you realize, if they had really acted when they were supposed to do, there’s so much delays and money we wouldn’t have had to pay. I mean, the reason why — one of the reasons why — our finances is deteriorated is because they wouldn’t give me — it took them almost a year to give me — the line of credit. I mean, when we’re in a situation that we need it, we need to move immediately.
We got a full-time Legislature, one of the only places in the country to have one, and it takes so long to get legislation passed. It’s ridiculous.
But then, why have a Legislature? Why have that process?
What, say again?
Why have a Legislature if the process, the entire —
Oh, you could get rid of them for me? I would love that. Only kidding.
There’s a legislative process because — and this is the reason why I do it, Kit — I’m not going to be governor all the time. It’s just like [Sen.] Ray Fonseca telling me, calling a health emergency — I don’t want to set up a situation we have like what we have with Trump, right?
Writing an executive order to right every wrong, I don’t like. I respect the democratic process that we have. I don’t want to do anything that I wouldn’t want any other governor to do to me if I was a citizen. So I’m not — I really try hard not to set precedents that would create havoc under somebody who has less restraint and control that happened to be sitting in the seat in the future.
And that’s the God honest truth. A lot of things I have power to do, and I just put them to the Legislature and let them talk about it and discuss. I could just call the emergency do it, but that’s not the right way to do it, you know.
But they force your hand sometimes because you can’t act. Imagine what kind of, where we would be today if I was waiting for the Legislature to make every decision I made during COVID. WAPA would have been done. We’d have been bankrupt. The Virgin Islands would have been in receivership, because they don’t make decisions, they take them too long — eight people to agree, you know — and for the lack of political courage. We need people who are not so concerned with getting re-elected and more concerned about doing for the people of the Virgin Islands.
You know all the things people ain’t gonna like, they ain’t gonna understand, but if you know you’re doing it for the best — I sleep like a baby every night because you do it for the best, and doing it for the best, I said it in a speech, priorities come in conflict, right? Like a $20 million gymnasium next to the gymnasium we have. That’s for the best? How could that be for the best? You know, ignoring our debts and bills that we have to pay and making sure that we build monuments unto ourselves? How could that be for the best? Anyway.
Sir, I think that’s our time….
No no no, I gotta catch a plane so… we got about 10 more minutes.
Wonderful. I’m sure you’ve seen or received some feedback since the State of the Territory. I don’t know if you spend time reading Facebook comments and things like that — why do you think so many people seem unhappy in the Virgin Islands?
I said it in the speech: inflation: You know, people are struggling, and it’s hard to get ahead. And you know, they say doing things the same way and expecting different results is insanity. And I’m trying to give people avenues to do things differently. I don’t think when people — I read comments sometimes, or listen to people on the radio sometimes — I really don’t think it’s about me. It’s about them.
People just want to be able to, you know, be renowned and hear their self and… they had a Facebook post, and for the one, it really annoyed me. And I wrote under it, I said, “I really despise Facebook posts that are really broad, don’t lend any specifics and don’t offer any solutions… and are not addressed to anybody who could do anything about it.”
And I put my email address under it. “This is the person you need to contact if you’re serious about fixing something.”
You know how many emails I got? Zero. I got one email from a lady who… found the email under the post and wrote me that her kids didn’t get Christmas gifts. And I arranged for her kids to get Christmas gifts.
I mean, zero, nobody. There was 300 comments under that. Zero. And I mean that tells you a lot about the people… popping out. Because if you serious, ask for a meeting for a governor. Join a civic organization. Run for the Senate. Ask for a meeting at your school, speak to your superintendent, talk to the administrator, contact — I answer every email I get, Kit, except maybe Mary Moorhead. I don’t answer hers anymore.
Before we go I’m gonna have to make sure I have your email address, because that’s good to know.
Everyone… right now I’m at 400 and I got 250 texts. If you reach out to me — you could ask people, I mean, I might email you back today — I email you back. And I answer my email, which is why I get on my commissioners hard when they don’t answer their email. Because if I can answer all of mine, they should be able to answer all of theirs.
There are a few, a handful of things that I don’t believe I’ve heard an update on in a while. So if you can just tick some of them off [the list] — the EU “blacklist” [of non-cooperative jurisdictions for tax purposes]. There are a lot of criticisms of it….
We’re working on that. We actually got a firm and we got some progress on Germany. I just saw an email come across about another improvement on that, we gotta follow up on some stuff. I didn’t know y’all follow that — I didn’t think anybody followed it. But yeah, we’re still working on that.
There are updates every once in a while in the news.
The administration changed, so like we, they have a problem now — we got new people in Treasury and stuff, but we keep pressing forward on it.
One of the things they noted when they added the USVI to the list — I think they delayed the addition just because of Irma and Maria and the impact to some of the reporting processes and whatnot — but they did note specifically that our EDA, they called it a “harmful, preferential tax regime.” So why would they say that?
I personally think is just them beefing with the United States because they know we don’t have our own tax system. It’s under the IRS, and we’re not an independent state, so we can’t report to a country what we’re doing, because that is against what the State Department would allow us to do.
So they’re not addressing their questions to the U.S. Why don’t they put the U.S. on the blacklist? And it’s ridiculous, because this is not the first time we were on a blacklist. You know, we’ve been on the blacklist as far as black as 2007, but a couple of letters and they would take us off. There’s a lot of international tax chatter going on, and I think this is their way of picking on the U.S., but we are part of the U.S. taxation system.
Gotcha, and since we’re talking about economic development initiatives, I do want to talk a little bit about the South Shore Trade Zone.
Sure, I can answer any questions.
Well, any movement there, and specifically I want to talk about the, I guess, the initiative to become a hub that will allow us to brand products as made in the U.S. Am I characterizing that correctly? And so what sort of negotiations have you had to have through, through the State Department, through the Coast Guard to —
No, we already have the right. We don’t have to negotiate anything. We already have the right to set our own customs duties and rate. As you know, part of your EDC tax benefits, they could set your custom duties to one percent — or zero, if the Legislature decides to move it to zero.
At one point we had — so you know, Customs is only here as a favor to the Virgin Islands, and there’s a compact that guides that. And what happened is, it used to be Customs alone, and we paid for it out of the Customs duty we collect, because our treaty says all duties, fees and taxes collected in the Virgin Islands stay in the Virgin Islands.
That’s why we don’t send our income tax to Washington. It stays here. So we pay them out of the duties we collect. When it joined with Homeland Security, that bill became so much that we didn’t get any money at all anymore. So we have our own custom zone that have the right to set our own custom duties. Anything with 30 percent value add in the Virgin Islands, that’s created with a foreign product, becomes a U.S. product.
Since you mentioned the word “customs” a few times, we should talk about Customs and Border Protection and the alarm that went through the community last week with the presence of ICE agents, which — they are in the territory periodically doing what they do. So how is your administration going to move forward in this next chapter under this next presidential administration?
So we issued a memo yesterday — mostly because of my concern for my young Virgin Islanders in the schools — that our schools are safe zone, and we advise all the principals and the teachers that we’re not to let any custom agents on our campuses, in any private places, unless they have a warrant signed by a judge.
We have a problem with immigrants trafficking guns and controls and good guns and drugs, but the vast majority of the immigrants that live in the Virgin Islands, undocumented, are good, hard working people just trying to make a living.
My other concern is, we have a lot of Virgin Islanders that may present as immigrants because they don’t speak fluent English — or they may just not speak English at all. They may speak another language — that are legal here, and I want to make sure that we’re not harassing the — immigration, ICE — is not harassing those people, forcing them to present documents, because they’re U.S. citizens. And that’s kind of profiling, right? So I just want to make sure our people are protected.
We also have a lot of Dreamers here. We have students and adults that came here when they were small, undocumented, went through our entire high school, our school, entire system, graduated from high school, live in the Virgin Islands, but have no documentation. You know, I feel a responsibility to protect those people too, because they don’t know any other place except the Virgin Islands. So we’re not assisting with any of the immigration efforts that are presently going on and in we want to make sure that the federal government is able to do what they do according to the law and what rights are afforded to us as citizens and residents of the Virgin Islands, to do our best to protect those
So the heads of some jurisdictions, I’m thinking of town and city mayors — I believe one was in Connecticut recently, I can think of some others in California and Oregon — have sent out advance notice to the communities when they were notified of an incoming ICE raid. Is that something that you would do?
They, no, they don’t notify us of what they’re doing. We don’t have any federal liaison or contact with raids on what ICE is doing. We are not aware of their operations. They wouldn’t tell us, because they, you know, we probably would. I mean, it’s like, this is the Virgin Islands. It’s not even about the governor. I mean, it’s like people have relationships with males and females who are not documented. They have kids with them, you know what I’m saying. So it’s like, this is a very small community, so I don’t think they’ll be putting out what they’re doing, because, you know, in my experience, our undocumented community have a great communication hotline system of what’s going on and where, and gets out the word pretty quickly if anything is going on. So I don’t think they’re going to be notifying us of any raids or anything else.
Gotcha. If you want to talk about construction costs… I know that you’ve said multiple times that the prices that you’re getting — for construction costs, when you put things out to bid — are pretty astronomical. But at the same time, the PFA is being sued by a contractor whose bid came in, like, $90 million below the company that was awarded the contract. So I’m wondering if you could speak to —
Which contract?
One of the Super PMO —
Oh you mean that… nuisance lawsuit that they, I mean, they didn’t even go through the bid protest process? They signed on to a bid process that they should ascribe to. I can’t talk about that, but you know, there’s been no action on that by the court. That speaks a mouthful. I can’t talk about that one.
I think that’s all from me, sir.
