Leadership from the School Construction and Maintenance Bureau endured their first budget hearing before the Senate Finance Committee Tuesday, 10 months after taking over the responsibility of building and maintaining the territory’s public schools from the V.I. Education Department.
Lawmakers spent much of the hearing grilling testifiers over the high salaries attached to management positions and relatively low number of “boots on the ground” employees after Sen. Novelle Francis Jr., who chairs the committee, noted that the bureau appeared “top-heavy.”
“You are top-heavy,” Sen. Carla Joseph agreed. “You are top-heavy and you need to reconsider how you’re spending the government money and the taxpayers’ money.”
Joseph listed a series of high-paying but apparently vacant positions at the bureau before concluding with a listing for a chief engineer budgeted at $13,180. She asked if that number was correct. The bureau’s chief financial officer, Charmaine Mayers, said the list Joseph referenced was out-of-date and may have been presented to the V.I. Management and Budget Office when the bureau first came online.
“This is the information that was provided to our post auditor,” Joseph said. “I’m only reading from what our post auditor received from the executive branch, so if you want us to have discussions, let us have discussions on real and pertinent information that is validated.”
Mayers stressed that the information Joseph referenced didn’t come from her or BSCM.
“This list has been exhausted, because we don’t have any vacant positions outside of the procurement officer,” she said. “All of the positions currently filled.”
The chief engineer position Joseph referenced earlier, Mayers said, went to a former Education Department employee whose salary increased from $96,000 to $112,000. Under Act 8717, which established the bureau, maintenance and construction personnel previously employed by VIDE were transferred to BSCM. Joseph questioned why the employee needed a $16,000 raise to do the same job.
“I’m just trying to understand the justification for this extra pay,” she said. “You’re going into a bureau, you were doing this work before — why is it?”
Mayers said the position required more work, “so, more work, more pay.” Joseph seemed dissatisfied with the answer.
Senate Majority Leader Kurt Vialet said later that when it comes to school maintenance, “you need workers on the ground.”
“You don’t need a bunch of management positions. You need people in the school that are working on a regular day basis,” he said, declaring that he was dizzy from looking at the numbers. “You got six individuals making over a hundred thousand dollars and 25 making less than [$35,000]. And some of them, some of those individuals got raises — to transfer over from the one to the next, they got a raise. This whole thing is confusion, colleagues.”
In the relatively short time since its inception, the bureau has already weathered criticism from lawmakers and the public over school conditions — particularly in the run up to the 2025-2026 school year. Mayers said during her prepared testimony Tuesday that establishing a brand-new department while also working to fulfill its mandate “has presented both great challenges and important opportunities.”
Mayers led testimony in defense of a $4.76 million allotment from the government’s general fund to support operations in the coming fiscal year. Act 8717 also mandates annual $5 million appropriations from the government’s School Construction Capital Fund. This year, Mayers said the bureau is requesting closer to $5.75 million to cover routine maintenance at schools and other facilities in both districts.
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