Saipan lawmakers pass $4.8M funding bill

Except for one, Saipan lawmakers voted yesterday to pass a bill that would allocate $4.8 million collected from poker fees in fiscal year 2009 to several programs and projects.

Rep. Tina M. Sablan, the lone lawmaker who opposed the passage, said she is very disappointed with the legislators’ action.

“We doubled the money for the Little League and for the fishing derby with no justification whatsoever! These are pet projects and they’re nice in times of plenty. But these are not times of plenty!” Sablan pointed out.

She said lawmakers should be given the opportunity to review the bill and to comment on the expenditures.

“We had less than a morning to review it,” the lawmaker pointed out.

House Local Bill 16-10, introduced by Rep. David M. Apatang and amended by House Speaker Arnold Palacios, was passed on a 14-1 vote.

After the voting, Speaker Palacios thanked members of the Saipan and Northern Islands Legislative Delegation for supporting the bill.

Palacios also admonished Sablan, counseling that if a train is leaving, a person has to jump onto the train or risk being left behind.

Sablan replied: “If you see the train is going in the wrong direction and is headed toward the cliff, then change the driver.”

In opposing its passage, Sablan first noted that the substitute bill was just introduced that morning and that they have not had enough time to review it.

“It is much different from the bill that it was substituting for. Then we went on recess and it was radically changed again,” she told Saipan Tribune after the session.

Basically, the lawmaker said, it is a budget using poker fees that are anticipated for the fiscal year.

“I just didn’t think that we were doing our due diligence as legislators,” she said.

Sablan said the responsible thing would be to give lawmakers time to review the proposed expenditure plan for fiscal year 2009.

She pointed out that the anticipated revenue of $4.7 million is expected to decline and that in the past there’s a trend of appropriating more than what the government actually collects.

“It seems to me grossly irresponsible to appropriate every single penny of what we expect to earn when those projections have been wrong in the last couple of years,” she said.

The Legislature, she added, might once again be over-appropriating.

With respect to the appropriation of hundreds of thousands for road paving and drainage improvements for secondary roads, Sablan said she doesn’t even know where these road are located.

“I think most of the legislators, with the exception of the ones who have been pushing for these particular roads, know where these roads are,” she said.

Sablan wanted to be given an opportunity to at least drive to the areas where these roads are and check who live there.

She also raised concerns about the $100,000 that will be allocated to the Northern Marianas Trade Institute.

“Not because I am downgrading the very noble mission of this institute but because we don’t really know much about the entity!” Sablan said. “We haven’t seen the business plan.”

She said it is her understanding until yesterday that this is an institute that is entirely private sector driven.

“I really feel that if we had just done our due diligence, put all our heads together and done this right, we could find real priorities where we could put this increasingly limited funds,” the legislator said.

With respect to the new baseball field project, Sablan cited that there is already a new baseball field on Navy Hill.

“And it is a small area! Do they need two baseball fields? That is something that we should be asking from the community,” Sablan said.

She said people in the CNMI should be aware of the culture of gamesmanship and irresponsible legislation that “is driving now in this Legislature and has existed for many, many years.”