Reach for your wallets. It is going to be expensive to pull America’s largest territory out of its death spiral, Puerto Rico’s outgoing governor warned the island’s new federal oversight board on Friday.

Even if Puerto Rico’s 3.4 million residents keep tightening their belts, and even if the creditors who lent it $74 billion agree to less than full repayment, the island will still “need the assistance of the federal government to bring this economic and humanitarian crisis to an end,” said Gov. Alejandro García Padilla, addressing the panel that the Obama administration set up to handle the territory’s staggering debt.

He urged the board’s seven members to join him “in one voice before Congress” to seek help.

Twenty floors below the room in Lower Manhattan where the governor made his remarks, protesters chanted their opposition to colonialism — which is how they view the power that the panel holds to make decisions about Puerto Rico’s future.

It was the first substantive meeting of the board, known in Spanish as the junta, the Spanish word for political group, that Congress created this year to direct Puerto Rico’s financial affairs. The group is similar to the control boards that have led other distressed American jurisdictions, like New York City in the mid-1970s. But because of heightened sensitivities about Puerto Rico’s colonial history, Congress gave Puerto Rico’s governor, and not the board, the authority to draft the 10-year fiscal plan that will become the basic road map for moving Puerto Rico out of its financial troubles.