NMC shares new building renovation, repair financing plans with lawmakers

The Saipan and Northern Islands Legislative Delegation and the Northern Marianas College met Thursday to discuss updates to repairs to a college campus devastated from last year’s Typhoon Soudelor and the funding that the delegation had provided to help in these repairs last year.

That $1.2 million appropriated by the local delegation last October has not yet been turned over to the college by the administration of Gov. Ralph DLG Torres and his Finance department.

NMC board of regent chair Frank Rabauliman said, during discussion on the issue, that all the delays in transferring of money was unfortunate but indicated this was based on “miscommunications.”

NMC acting president David Attao, for his part, said “they heard they needed things” from Office of Management and Budget and Finance on steps to get the funding transferred over to them.

Rep. Antonio Sablan (Ind-Saipan) appeared disappointed by the slow transfer of funds as did other lawmakers. He stressed that the local public law last year was “very basic” in who the funds would be transferred to and who would be expenditure authority.

“I am really curious to find out why it is so difficult to make this money available to college,” Sablan said, noting that appropriations made from other local laws after the NMC funding was appropriated had “been made available and has been expended” and that for these “money has already been tapped.”

“I don’t think there is anything in this public law that would make this funding so difficult to be available to the college…The law is very basic,” he said.

Sen. Justo Quitugua (Ind-Saipan) noted that it’s been seven months since the local law appropriated the funds.

“We are talking about an urgent situation,” he said, noting that materials exposed to rain and sun may cost more to repair.

Sen. Arnold Palacios (R-Saipan) hoped that in the next day or so NMC got the $1.2 million that delegation appropriated in days deliberation last year. “I am a little bit dismayed but we need to move forward. I hope the secretary of Finance covers over the funds to the college.”

The lawmakers and college also discussed ways to improve the decades-old campus in As Terlaje.

The discussion included topics of debt financing inclusive of charging additional fees to college students to help the college build a new facility.

“The college has been working very carefully with the delegation and the government and we are trying our best since last year to build the facility so the students can have somewhere safer and better to attend. And we can run our college the normally way we do,” Attao told reporters after the meeting. “Fortunately, SNILD has supported us with $1.2 million in funds that we haven’t yet been able to access but now the secretary of Finance and we are in communication on how exactly to approach that. And we are hoping to get that soon.”

Attao said the $4.5 million for repairs is what the college has worked with is the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the governor to help pay for the expenses on a reimbursement basis for facilities that were damaged by Typhoon Soudelor.

The NMC board in their last meeting voted to go into an “Alternative Pilot” project, Attao said, where he said they could “repair small things and save up the rest up of the money towards a [new] facility.”

We are going to repair what we can the small parts and take the rest of the money and try to build a new facility for the students, which is roughly 14 new classrooms, a student center, and student cafeteria…But in order to do that we have funds upfront to pay for that. And we don’t have that right now so that’s the reasons why we are trying to develop the mechanisms that we’ve been researching to do so,” he said, acknowledging that one of them was debt service, when asked.

He said one, they’d need authorization from the Legislature to go into debt, and secondly, find funding to serve as collateral, and third, find a mechanism to pay for that.

Asked to clarify a statement he made about first implementing a “fee this Fall [semester]” to “collect $200,000 a year and take a loan in that amount” during the discussion with SNILD, Attao said he just gave that number as an example.

“It could be $10, it could be $1,000, it’s not set in stone, and it’s what we can afford. We are not trying to spend anymore than we can afford. And we don’t want to burden the students in the long run too.

“Minimum. Not too much,” he also said when asked about the rates charged on student fees.

“It’s for their benefit and it’s for the future of the CNMI… The students and the community really deserve new facilities at NMC. We deserve that as a whole because that’s what we’ve been pushing for the longest time—people before me, regents before us. We are the group that is making it happen now.”