Fixing the shaky, underpowered energy grid, bringing about statehood remain as top priorities
By John McPhaul
Governor-elect Jenniffer González Colón has a tone of vindication in her voice when she talks about her successful run for governor.
“People blasted me saying I couldn’t deliver kids while running for governor, and I did it. It wasn’t me, it was God, it was my family, it was my husband,” she said in an interview with the STAR. “I’m not different from any other woman who has to work, and at the same time raise a family and be an agent of change.”
She said she feels a special responsibility to the younger generation.
“I know that I do have a responsibility to open doors for kids and young women so that they can enter politics or any area of their interest,” she said. “I do have a responsibility to showcase that girls can do whatever they want.”
The governor-elect said the reason she got into politics is statehood.
She said her father was very involved in politics and took a very young Jenniffer to defend the position of statehood for Puerto Rico at the United Nations.
Since then, bringing statehood to the island has been her focus.
González Colón said statehood is in a sense the law of the land following the outcome of the Nov. 5 plebiscite, which statehood won with 57% of the vote.
She said having a resident commissioner from the pro-commonwealth Popular Democratic Party, Resident Commissioner-elect Pablo José Hernández Rivera, in Congress will not deter her from making pursuing statehood as a priority.
“I think the people of Puerto Rico spoke loud and clear in support of statehood in the referendum,” the governor-elect said. “... The same people who voted for him voted for statehood, the same people who voted for him voted for me. You cannot call on the people in the States to support statehood. If he is not interested in status change, I am, and I will promote it.”
She said her number one priority other than statehood is fixing Puerto Rico’s broken electric power generation system.
Energy generation was the focus of the second meeting of the Committee for Energy Transformation, which took place Monday, she said.
“How can local manufacturing operate without power?” González Colón said. “You cannot have economic development when you don’t have power.”
“My first bill will be regarding permits, so we can transcend, so you can move [quickly], like Florida does -- you apply for the permit, you receive the permit immediately, then you have several days to provide the rest of the information,” she said. “We can have that in Puerto Rico so you can move the projects that have been stuck.”
The second bill, she said, will be the appointment of an energy czar who will conduct overnight with the operators about power generation on the island and will be able to use the $18 billion allocated for energy that is not being used.
For her next priority, the governor-elect earlier this week named a tax reform committee that will review the inventory tax and advise on lowering the tax rate for corporations, individuals and capital gains.
“The next item is to create savings accounts for individuals with major disabilities on the island -- we don’t have that,” González Colón said.
Another priority is to provide vouchers for families with kids, not just those for kids in Head Start.
“If we can do those tax reforms in the first session of the year, that would put in place all the new regulations to get things running on the island and block the economic distress that we are experiencing,” she said.
If you drive around the island you’ll find clutches of idle young people hanging out in gas stations and the like, a manifestation of the island’s poverty. How does the governor-elect intend to address that issue?
“First, I believe we can change the focus of education to STEM [the acronym for science, technology, engineering and math] and provide better education in science and math and technology,” González Colón said. “We’re talking about reforms to the University of Puerto Rico to change the curriculum in many other programs and the funds are there for that.”
The other problem, she said, is the environments of many of the island’s schools.
“If we don’t try to maintain a better environment, then how do you keep a kid in school?” the governor-elect said. “The other thing is giving kids who aren’t ready for high school the experience [of working]. I believe we put everybody to work, and sometimes they don’t want to work because they may lose their benefits.”
In the mainland United States, the income limits tied to public assistance are higher so people can work and still receive their benefits, González Colón said.
“If we were a state we wouldn’t be talking about this,” she said.
The governor-elect mirages to restore some sanity to PR's debacle are commendable, yet they sound like she just became aware of some of the most deep and pernicious problems the country had experienced for the last 25 years; during this period, her own political party had occupied the power seat for 18 years. It's also surprising, her attempt to present these issues as new when in fact, she had been at the table, since 2002 when she was initially elected to the legislature; they were discussed, created and pushed into the national environment without the NPP' solutions.
The force that drove her into politics, as she stated, had been to bring the statehood to PR which creates a challenging situation…