Guam Visitors Bureau’s General Manager Régine Biscoe Lee told reporters on Tuesday the jobs of 16 limited term appointment employees are “in jeopardy” though said the bureau would do what it can to move forward.
News follows the Guam Legislature’s budget session on Monday, where lawmakers passed another record-high government of Guam budget bill for fiscal year 2027 that gives GVB $2.4 million less than what it asked for.
Lee said GVB management will meet with its board of directors and its legal team to determine how to prioritize its resources for the next fiscal year.
“We’ll have to identify services that may need to be reduced, delayed, reprioritized, or maybe transitioned to outside contractors, which maybe again, be an expense that we will have to incur,” she said.
This is the bureau’s plan B.
The 16 limited term appointment employees, LTAs, in the bureau’s destination management team play a critical role in the keeping Guam’s tourism product clean, according to Biscoe Lee.
GVB typically collects around five to eight tons of trash each month, she said. This number skyrocketed post-Super Typhoon Sinlaku where the maintenance team cleared 220 tons of green waste along with other heavy debris across the island.
So far, in the 10 months of the 2026 fiscal year, GVB collected a total of 53.2 tons of waste.
“It’s definitely a priority to keep our island clean, and we’ve demonstrated that over the last few years, weeks, months, especially post-typhoon,” Biscoe Lee said. “We’ll continue to do that work.”
On how much responsibility of the clean-up and maintenance of parks and public spaces should fall on GVB and other agencies like the Department of Parks and Recreation or Department of Public Works, Biscoe Lee said it was up to the Legislature to shift resources to those agencies to accomplish that task.
“I mean, they control the purse strings,” she said. “It’s a challenge for us, but we’re going to continue to do the best we can with what we have.”
Ultimately, the GVB respects the Legislature’s budget process, Biscoe Lee emphasized.
Legal confusion
According to a Monday letter by tourism oversight chairman Sen. Jesse Lujan, the bureau requested to restore GVB’s authority to employ LTAs.
Lujan wrote that the fiscal year 2027 spending bill does not repeal a GVB-specific exemption contained in the fiscal year 2026 budget.
On the session floor Monday afternoon, Lujan called it an “unclear request” and said the board of directors should adopt a formal resolution requesting the proposed legislation, like in the governing boards in the Guam Waterworks Authority and Guam Power Authority.
Lujan opined that perhaps the 16 LTAs may not have been validly authorized.
“Operational necessity may explain why GVB wants to retain these employees, but operational necessity is not a substitute for legal authority,” he wrote.
