Northern Marianas College Board of Regents chair Juan Lizama last Friday questioned the practice of excluding honorary members of the board during executive sessions.<\/p>\n
In a special board meeting, Lizama expressed his willingness to include the honorary members in future executive sessions\u2014an idea opposed by regents Elaine Orilla and Frank Rabauliman, citing that the closed-door meetings tackle important and highly confidential matters about the college.<\/p>\n
There are three honorary members on the board who serve as non-voting individuals\u2014president of Associated Students of NMC; faculty staff president; and staff senate president.<\/p>\n
The chair earlier asked interim president Lorraine Cabrera on who originally decided to exclude honorary members in closed-door sessions.<\/p>\n
Cabrera said it\u2019s been a long time since non-voting members were allowed participation during executive sessions and it was during her stint as staff senate president.<\/p>\n
Based on its bylaws, it is the board\u2019s prerogative to include or exclude the non-voting members in its executive meetings.<\/p>\n
Orilla said she\u2019s not comfortable allowing non-voting members to attend executive sessions because it may impact the board\u2019s operation and policy.<\/p>\n
But for Lizama, the presence of the non-voting members aims to bring more ideas and voices to the discussion table and not to bring such information out to their peers.<\/p>\n
The chairman also pointed out that the inclusion of the said members is limited to non-personnel issues only.<\/p>\n
John Cook, NMC acting faculty senate president, welcomes Lizama\u2019s recommendation and assured the regents that he would keep \u201cconfidentiality\u201d rule on his part.<\/p>\n
However the board did not come up with a \u201cdecision\u201d last Friday.<\/p>\n
Meantime, the board suspended its policy 1015 which requires them to elect new officer\/officers every last Thursday of June each year. <\/p>\n
Lizama explained that only the vice chairperson position will be up for grabs in the election which is re-scheduled on July 14. Orilla\u2019s term as vice chairperson expires this month.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Northern Marianas College Board of Regents chair Juan Lizama last Friday questioned the practice of excluding honorary members of the board during executive sessions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-152861","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152861","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=152861"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152861\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=152861"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=152861"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=152861"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}