Construction update

One never tires of the beautiful flowers that can be found around Tinian

These workers are busy installing Christmas lights along the new median on Broadway

The lights include small Christmas trees shaped from the lights

At the end is the Manger and a large Christmas tree made of lights. The workers said that the lights would be turned on next Friday--the day after Thanksgiving.

This house has sat with just a roof on for almost one year. Now it has windows and a door... perhaps someone will finally move in!

The garage up on Marpo is almost done. Just some final painting to do

There is a new retaining wall for the garden area and a concrete apron to tie-in the yard to the road. Not much left to do!

They continue to use large equipment on the road through town

You can see by the height of the fire hydrant how deep they have cut the road

They continue to remove the existing road. I'm not sure how far they will go before starting to fill-in the road with new road-base.

There has been no new work up at the casino site. There have been lots of news in the local paper about new casinos that are to be built on the island...but it seems that they are all quite a ways away from even being started. Perhaps they are all waiting to find out the effect of the new federal immigration laws that start next summer. If the worst happens, and workers can no longer be easily brought to the islands, it may kill any major construction on the islands. After all, if they don't have the workers to build and service the new casinos, they are not going to spend the money to build them in the first place.

Having dealt with similar problems in the states, where we would try to find blue-collar workers for the roofing industry, I can understand the issues. We simply could not find local workers, and so ended up hiring Mexicans to do the work. Perhaps half of our workforce were Mexicans. We would have hired even more, but the immigration policies of the US prevented it. They were very restrictive, and very slow to process any foreign worker. If the same bureaucracy is placed upon the CNMI, they are going to have problems finding enough workers to fill their needs. Time will tell.