Smaller budget for FY 2000

The administration has revised the current fiscal year’s budget several times given substantial decline in revenue generation. It now looks forward to a smaller budget package in fiscal year 2000.

The revision went from an optimistic $248 million down to $215 million for the current fiscal year’s budget. Further revision may be needed when revenue collection for next month shows additional decline in local revenues.

Payroll alone requires $600,000 per hour to pay the more than 4,000 government employees. This doesn’t include government obligations for the retirement program, vendors who have waited long and hard for their money, or taxpayers who have yet to receive their tax returns.

As revenue plummets by leaps and bounds, the issue turns from push to shove and now we start getting down to the core of the problem: How much has the local government been subsidizing the social and educational needs of our friends from the freely associated states. A public hearing is scheduled on a proposed legislation to buckle down on such cost, including the determination whether the NMI should continue allowing our brothers and sisters free migration into the NMI.

The dire financial straits of the local government has forced policymakers to get down to basics on an issue that could easily be interpreted by the freely associated states as unbecoming of an island community. In short, it’s island hospitality versus expenses where the host shoulders most of the social and educational costs of our friends from the freely associated states.

Local leadership needs to aggressively pursue forcing the US Department of Interior’s Office of Insular Affairs to pay for these costs it made without consulting with the leadership of the three jurisdictions of Hawaii, Guam and the Northern Marianas. It must ask OIA in forthright fashion what does it plan to do with a nightmare it created years ago that most troublesome for the governments affected. It’s a hasty prescription all around in order to save its hide by passing the buck to local governments today.

In all these confusion, local leadership needs to refocus on substantive issues so that it could ask the right questions and pursue the right answers without any further delay. It must aggressively pursue what’s due its coffers executed without consent of the three jurisdictions which now paralyzes government operations. How warpedly ironic that as our house is being gutted by a raging fire, OIA chooses to go picnicking–economic conference–when it should be grabbing bails of water to put out its self-imposed inferno. How much longer must we tolerate this level of incompetency that presents unsolicited problems for local governments?