A petition originated by The St. Croix Avis calls for U.S. Congress to modify the territory's 1954 Revised Organic Act to allow St. Croix to secede from the territory.

V.I. Delegate to Congress Donna Christensen said on Tuesday that she understood the growing disenchantment of St. Croix residents regarding the island's faltering economy and public services.

She also empathized with the desires of many people to update the political and economic structure that was established nearly 50 years ago.

She stopped well short, however, of endorsing secession.

"Change must come through the development and adoption of a new constitution," Christensen said, and she promised to make public "in the near future" her own constitutional proposal.

Although the current Organic Act could be modified by a majority vote in both houses of U.S. Congress, Leary said, the likelihood of a new territory being created is a "long shot."

Years of simmering Crucian resentment toward the seat of government on St. Thomas, he said, reflects the vastly different geographic, historical and economic realities of the two islands.

St. Thomas was an international trading center that developed an economy based on tourism, while St. Croix was a plantation society that turned to industrial development.

"There have been lots of attempts to try to deal with the simple fact of geography that we're separate islands," Leary said, "and that does make a difference, even in the age of electronics."

But Leary, the editor of "Basic Political and Constitutional Documents of the U.S. Virgin Islands," said that government reform needs to be addressed comprehensively rather than in a piecemeal fashion.

The distribution of power between St. Croix and St. Thomas, for example, is central to territorial politics, he said. And questions concerning the size of the Legislature and whether numbered seats or geographic districts are preferable deserve careful, dispassionate analysis based upon solid economic facts.

"I think that the right way to do it is not by separation but by examining through a constitution how we can create autonomy and political responsiveness within the present political arrangement," Leary said.

Since 1976, he said, the Virgin Islands has had the right to replace the 1954 Revised Organic Act with its own territorial constitution, but voters rejected both drafts that were offered - in 1979 and 1981.

Gov. Charles Turnbull has asked that a constitution be drafted, Leary said, and the professor has offered to help Sen. Shawn-Michael Malone, chairman of the Government Operations Committee, who would be responsible for such an effort.

According to Leary, a constitutional commission might be more successful than a constitutional convention. The approval process used also will be critical in determining the success or failure of such an effort, he said.

Calls to Lt. Gov. Vargrave Richards, whom Turnbull has given responsibility for spearheading St. Croix's economic revitalization, were not returned.

Noel Loftus, chairman of St. Croix Alive, said that his organization has taken no position on the question of secession, but he believes that the issue may serve as a "wake-up call" for the people of St. Croix.

"We do not have a government sensitive to the needs of the people of St. Croix," Loftus said, citing specific frustrations with the V.I. Education Department, Public Works Department, Port Authority, Tourism Department and Police Department.

"But I'm not going to tell you at this point in time that the sentiment is to go directly to secession," he said.

"We've not discussed it. We have not publicly taken our grievances to the government and said 'Start dealing with it.'"

St. Croix Chamber of Commerce President Frank Fox said that he planned to poll his membership on the secession question.

William Cissel, a historian with the National Park Service on St. Croix, said that tensions and complaints between the two largest Virgin Islands are nothing new. The idea of secession, however, is new.

But the current proposal, he said, does harken back to the two municipal councils - one in Christiansted and one in Charlotte Amalie - that under the territory's original Organic Act existed from 1936 to 1954.

According to Leary, one goal of the 1954 revision was to increase efficiency by replacing those two municipal councils with one territorial government.