HAGÅTÑA (The Guam Daily Post) — The white-collar crimes division of the Office of the Attorney General now has documents related to an estate litigation, one of the land-related cases
Speaker: GTA should pay $100,000 per year for new subsea cables guampdn.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from guampdn.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
They said GTA should be required to provide fair access to competitors to keep prices low.
Lawmakers this week held a public hearing on a bill that would allow the governor to negotiate and issue a lease for GTA’s latest underwater cable project. The bill was introduced after GTA’s efforts to get a lease from the CHamoru Land Trust Commission, which owns the submerged lands, stalled last year.
“I think the government needs to go into this with their eyes wide open,” and not just rely on information provided by GTA, said John Day, president of Pacific Data Systems. “The government’s role here is not only to provide government land, but also to ensure that that government land is going to be used for the public interest.”
The measure would remove the Land Trust from the leasing process.
San Agustin’s Bill 36 also would waive the legal requirement for competitive bidding of Land Trust leases and allow only GTA TeleGuam to lease the submerged land for its $30 million underwater telecommunications cable project.
The bill is scheduled for a public hearing March 11, by the committee on land. It authorizes the governor to negotiate and issue a 21-year lease for submerged land at the Alupang reef flat and channel. The money from the lease would go to the Land Trust.
GTA’s proposal to lease two submerged sites, in Tamuning and Agat, was stalled last summer after the Land Trust board, which was receptive to the idea, decided to begin a competitive bidding process, as required by the Land Trust law.