Chalan Taki: The road to Adelup?

By Vincent Akimoto

The access road to George Washington High School has finally been paved.

The neglected, unsafe and pothole-plagued motorway is the main entry point for student drop-off and pick-up as well as for students driving themselves to school.

Based on local news coverage, neither the Guam Department of Education nor the Department of Public Works had given any priority to paving the GW access road this school year or at any other time over the past eight years.

It took the unrelenting, verbose determination of the next generation of young citizens to make it happen.

In the words of Lewis Carroll, the author of “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.”

Our $1.5 billion government of Guam spends a lot of taxpayer time and money without proactively fixing things like village access roads, dilapidated high schools in Yigo, or the hospital where most brown island babies are born.

Instead, GovGuam buries the people’s money in scatter-brained tourist attraction projects that have nothing to do with cleaning up our dirty, little island chock-full of abandoned vehicles and white goods trash.

As the visionary Helen Keller once said, “A bend in the road is not the end of the road, unless you fail to make the turn.” The message to obstinate GW high school student drivers is that bureaucratic obstacles and GovGuam failures are not final.

Success and civic progress depend on Guam citizens taking the time and energy to adapt, persevere, and triumph over lame GovGuam political excuses.

But GovGuam does not just selectively fail GW student citizens. Indeed, GovGuam has been generously democratic in its civil service misadventures.

After Gov. Leon Guerrero's failure to use millions of dollars in federal relief funds, public school students across the island have again been cheated out of an adequate education and have endured inexcusable double sessions.

For another year, Simon Sanchez High School remains unbuilt, maddeningly mired in a procurement protest.

GovGuam is like the servant who hid from self-sacrifice and compromise, burying her talent in the ground. The servant has been paralyzed by a corrupted view of service. Rather than start the GMH journey of a thousand miles and a $770 million hospital renovation, she has chosen the safest and laziest course: doing nothing.

As a result, Guam Memorial Hospital is still broken, unsafe and remains condemned by the national Joint Commission on Hospital Accreditation.

At the expense of President Donald Trump, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers conducted an authoritative assessment of the fire protection/life safety systems, roof infrastructure, and air quality systems at our island’s only public hospital, and found them to be in poor condition.

In a seminal report issued dramatically at the dawn of the Covid-19 pandemic, the U.S. Army’s best construction experts told the governor that GMH sucked.

Magahit, for any who still think we have no say, during this time when $10.7 billion has been falling from the federal skies, our Governor of Guam has failed to fix GMH; failed to rebuild Simon Sanchez High School and failed to even consider repairing the access road to GW.

Procurement problems, legal battles, golf carts and Haute Dawgs. Gov. Leon Guerrero has faced many challenges that have distracted her from fixing important things like GMH's homicidal, pyrogenic electrical panel.

Eight years later, we are left with a typhoon-ravaged public hospital and a gubernatorial legacy full of broken promises.

The solution to GovGuam’s ritualized custom of catastrophic civic failure is the swift and permanent abolition of political corruption and crony nepotism in our neo-colonialist island government. 

The elimination of incompetent GovGuam management and patronage systems must happen first before our dreams of a better tomorrow can ever be realized.

The perverse tradition of stealing from the future to pay for present fiscal dysfunction must stop now. Current leadership must stop lying to the next generation of citizens.

Responsible management of public health resources does not manifest as the hiring of overpaid, unqualified sycophants who are barely capable of on-the-job training. Yet GMH, which is perpetually broke and filthy dirty, continues to stuff itself with 1,200 employees who don’t all contribute to the health of our island.

The 2026 GMH budget, in its current form, is the classic case of Gov. Lou’s

political cowardice and the durability of an evil status quo as sanctioned by Speaker Frank Blas Jr. and Sen. Chris Duenas, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee.

With next year's hospital budget well over $210 million and no planned payroll reductions, GMH already acknowledges it cannot pay for medical supplies or operational needs. Instead, all its projected collections are committed to nonessential employee payroll expenses. 

Republican Sens. Chris Duenas and Vice Speaker Tony Ada apparently are cool with GMH's budgetary debauchery. Both legislative "leaders" demonstrated cold-blooded allegiance to wasteful GovGuam spending ostensibly to garner votes. Neither made any attempt to reduce careless hospital spending nor to cut its irresponsible payroll expenses.

Likewise, Democratic gubernatorial candidates Therese Terlaje and Joe San Augustin made no meaningful attempt to hold GMH accountable for safe patient care. Both these Democratic senators have previously led past Guam legislative efforts to perpetuate the criminally dangerous GovGuam policy of failed patient care at GMH.

GMH currently employs more than 500 nonessential, non-clinical employees. These nonessential political patronage positions cost our public hospital more than $30 million a year in salary and benefits. This evil political spoils system prevents GMH from buying critical medicines, hiring necessary medical staff and fixing the life safety system to protect sick hospital patients from dying.

While the governor and the legislature again pretend to be oblivious, they admit that any attempt to remove the GMH political patronage burden would be political suicide.

These kinds of GovGuam politicians are worthless public servants. The only remedy would be for them themselves to suffer the systemic medical failure of GMH during their time of need. As the parable describes, their final accommodation at GMH may be a place of weeping and gnashing of teeth.

As the great reggae philosopher Bob Marley once said, “Life is one big road with lots of signs. So when you're riding through the ruts, don’t complicate your mind. Flee from hate, mischief, and jealousy. Don’t bury your thoughts; put your vision into reality. Wake Up and Live!”

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