GOV. Eddie Calvo made an unexpected one-day trip to Saipan last Friday; and while he was gone, Lt. Gov. Ray Tenorio, apparently the acting governor for the day, vetoed a bill that would have put some competition back into the process of deciding which company should provide health insurance for GovGuam employees.

The entire exercise may have been laudable, but it was mostly laughable. Gov. Calvo can’t avoid the appearance of conflict of interest simply by flying up to the CNMI while his deputy takes action on a bill that benefits one of the governor’s family companies. SelectCare is a Calvo enterprise, after all, and it is the sole provider of health insurance for GovGuam.

If the governor wanted to truly steer clear of that conflict, he should have signed the bill or allowed it to become law without any signature. What he did instead only focuses attention on the obvious problem he has whenever the government’s business intertwines with his family’s.

There isn’t very much he can do about that. The voters of Guam obviously knew what they were doing when they voted Eddie Baza Calvo into office. Any time a Calvo runs for office it becomes a referendum on those companies bearing that name. The same can probably be said about other well-known and prominent local families, but few have done as good a job of marketing their various services and branding their name as have the Calvos.

We live in a community where the term “conflict of interest” has a variety of meanings but no clear definition. Mostly we have “harmonies of interest” or a “synergy of interests,” or something like that. The alternative is to require all holders of elected office to place all of their private, family business interests into some sort of blind trust, which they cannot touch or influence as long as they are in office.

That probably won’t work here. Guam is a relatively small place; most of us know our elected officials personally, and for the most part we like that sort of intimate public administration. It would be hard to separate oneself from family interests once elected, and unreasonable to expect anybody to do it. About the best we can hope for is at least an attempt at objectivity.

We’re reminded of something once said in an earlier time in America: “If it’s good for General Motors, it’s good for the country!” If it’s good for the Calvos, we wonder, is it equally good for Guam?