The decision to make COVID vaccinations mandatory for the Guam Power Authority and Guam Waterworks Authority employees will rest solely on their respective general managers.

The Consolidated Commission on Utilities did not take an official position on the controversial issue at their meeting last night, and instead passed it on to the GM's.

The commissioners agreed on one thing about mandatory vaccination: it was a hard decision to make. They were split over the question of what should prevail, individual rights versus the public good.

"There's two sayings I always think about when we talk about freedom," Simon Sanchez, commissioner said. "Freedom's a wonderful word but we also know that freedom's not free and it's not unlimited. You can't yell, a justice once wrote, you can't yell fire, just cause you have the freedom of speech, you can't yell fire in a movie theater or something like that. And the freedom for me to swing my fist stops at your nose."

Commissioner Mike Limtiaco disagreed.

"You know I've expressed my concern Mr. Chair in the working session that making the vaccine a condition of employment, it's completely unacceptable," he said. "Even the physicians' advisory board doesn't believe, the governor's own physician advisory board and the head has already come out and said they don't agree with it either."

GWA General Manager Miguel Bordallo spoke on the bigger picture for his agency.

"We need to keep our employees safe," he said. "This to me would do that. Would it infringe on somebody's right? I'll be up front about that it might infringe on somebody's right, but to me it's the greater good. That's what I have to wrestle with."

"I know it's a tough decision on our part but at the end of the day there's about 150 employees, is my math right? That are not vaccinated," Francis Santos, commissioner said. "Either we help ourselves or ignore the fact that someone is gonna get COVID in our workplace. It's a guarantee!"

In the end, Sanchez offered an amendment, passed by the commission, to leave it up to management to come up with a vaccination and testing policy, to include whether it will be mandatory. GWA's general manager, in preliminary meetings with GPA's John Benavente, indicates they're leaning that way.

"If you don't want to get vaccinated then you can test," Bordallo said. "And that allows you if you don't have the exemption and you want to continue to be unvaccinated then you can test."

"And what if I didn't wanna do that what would happen," Sanchez questioned.

"And then if you didn't wanna do that then you're just refusing to comply with the policy then you would be subject to disciplinary action," Bordallo said.

Exemptions will be considered for medical reasons and strongly held religious beliefs.