When Senator Duenas introduces something and Adelup puts on the full-court press you know something is up. I support allowing for the Administration to pursue any recourse to recover the costs to close Ordot Dump. The issues, not covered in the article, are as follows: 1) Why are we appropriating an addtional 350k to hire people at Adelup to do the legwork for the case, AND paying a law firm up to 30-60 MILLION dollars of the peoples winnings? If the people are doing the legwork, we should not have to pay such a high contingency fee to the attorneys. Otherwise, if we are going to pay such a high fee, we should not have to appropriate the peoples money to do their legwork. That simple. 2) The legislature has been to court twice (and won) this term and spent from its own budget using local attorneys. The Governor has at least two attorneys on his payroll, not to mention we have an Attorney General who according to the Organic Act is the Chief Legal Officer of the Government of Guam. Surely at least the legwork can be done by these folks, and not cost us another 350k in Adelup hiring to get it done. If the AG is an issue, then make it an issue in this election, and in a matter of weeks we can have this front and center in the AGs office where this belongs. The Bill as written is really a legal avenue for the Governor to be able to use the peoples money to do all the research and preparation work, and then hand over a pre-packaged case to an attorney to scoop 30-60 million of the settlement. Any claims that the RFP process will make this legit is disngenous because the justification to select a hand-picked law firm will be made on the basis of expertise - the players have undoubtedly all been positioned. No wonder they are so upset that we sent it back to Committee. As far as the merits of the Bill we can and should still pursue any available recourse to recover costs of closing the dump. Lets make sure we are not paying for it twice by doing the law firms work for them in the beginning, and handing them a settlement cut at the end.
Posted on: Tue, 30 Sep 2014 21:36:12 +0000
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