Is there a rift developing between Governor Albert Bryan Jr. and Lieutenant Governor Tregenza Roach in the waning days of their administration? Some may be left wondering as the governor admits that he was blindsided by his lieutenant’s opinion on controversial salary increases for members of the executive branch.
In late May, Mr. Roach announced to the public that he had written to Governor Bryan urging him to rescind the salary increases that had been recommended by the VI Public Officials Compensation Commission. According to Mr. Roach, the appointment of commission chair Haldine Davies as director of the V.I. Bureau of Economic Research has tainted the work of the commission and raised questions about its impartiality.
According to the Lieutenant Governor, he only learned of Mr. Davies’s appointment through media reports. “Had you and I consulted about this appointment, I would not have agreed to such a move, as it taints the work of the Commission and now makes the wage increases appear an instance of quid pro quo—wage increase for job appointment,” Mr. Roach wrote in his press statement.
However, during Monday’s interview with Consortium publisher Ernice Gilbert, Governor Bryan painted a different picture. “He knew before we appointed [Davies] to the position,” Mr. Bryan said of Mr. Roach. “Of course he did, I told him.”
Governor Bryan said he was “disappointed” in the Mr. Roach’s approach to the situation. “Up to now the Lieutenant Governor hasn’t spoken to me,” he disclosed. “We didn’t speak before then, either…I came to my desk, and he dropped off a letter, and I heard about it…people were calling me from the press at the same time,” the governor said. “I didn’t even get the decency of a conversation.”
According to Governor Bryan, he believes the lieutenant governor has staked out this position for the sake of political expediency. “I understand everybody in this situation here have to run for office. I don’t,” he said on Monday. Nonetheless, “he should have at least come and had a conversation with me and say ‘hey gov, I need to bail out this election.’ I would have been like, “‘throw the blow, I good.’”
However, questions about whether he would support Lieutenant Governor Roach in his presumed quest for higher office were met with demurral. “Is he running for governor?” Mr. Bryan wondered, minutes after treating the hypothetical as an inevitability.
Whatever his motivations for the public distancing, Governor Bryan believes Lieutenant Governor Roach was successful in achieving his strategic objective. “He got the front page of the paper. Mission accomplished.”
British Caribbean News
