{"id":17022,"date":"2011-09-02T09:08:38","date_gmt":"2011-09-02T09:08:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/newspaper.ctsi-logistics.com\/?p=17022"},"modified":"2011-09-02T09:08:38","modified_gmt":"2011-09-02T09:08:38","slug":"senate-looks-at-passing-fy-2012-budget-bill-on-sept-8","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/senate-looks-at-passing-fy-2012-budget-bill-on-sept-8\/","title":{"rendered":"Senate looks at passing FY 2012 budget bill on Sept. 8"},"content":{"rendered":"
By Haidee V. Eugenio
\nReporter<\/div>\n

With less than a month to work on a budget bill that the House worked on for four months, the Senate said yesterday it’s going to pass on Sept. 8 a $102-million spending package that could be in the form of a substitute bill, mainly to give additional funding to education.<\/p>\n

Acting governor Eloy S. Inos, at the same time, said the administration is now preparing an emergency declaration in the event that a budget is not passed and signed into law before the start of fiscal year 2012 on Oct. 1.<\/p>\n

An emergency declaration from the governor is needed to be able to identify government employees who will be exempted from a shutdown, in the absence of a legislation defining \u201ccritical\u201d service employee positions.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe budget [process] is not difficult.It’s the political decision associated with the budget [that] is the tough part. We’re not the Legislature; they are,\u201d said Inos, who also oversees government finances.<\/p>\n

The Senate received the official transmission of the budget bill, House Bill 17-215, House Substitute 1, House Draft 5, yesterday afternoon.<\/p>\n

The House passed the fiscal year 2012 budget bill on Wednesday night, barely a month before the start of the new fiscal year.<\/p>\n

Senate President Paul Manglona (Ind-Rota) and Fiscal Affairs Committee chair Jovita Taimanao (Ind-Rota) separately said that while the Senate is given a small window of opportunity to review the House-passed bill, they will act expeditiously to avoid another government shutdown.<\/p>\n

Under the Constitution, the government will have to shut down if there’s no budget passed before the start of a new fiscal year. The shutdown will remain until a new budget is passed and enacted. Lawmakers also won’t be able to receive their salaries during the duration of the shutdown.<\/p>\n

Manglona, Taimanao, and Sen. Ralph Torres (R-Saipan) met yesterday afternoon with Northern Marianas College president Dr. Sharon Hart and other NMC officials to discuss the college’s request to have a budget of at least $5.2 million to meet federal maintenance-of-efforts requirements.<\/p>\n

The House budget bill gives NMC a $4,018,800 budget.<\/p>\n

The senators said they will also meet with Public School System officials to go over their budget request. PSS said the House budget is short of $106,000 to meet the maintenance-of-effort requirement of the U.S. Department of Education.<\/p>\n

Other defeated floor amendments that members of the House minority could also be resurrected by the nine-member Senate.<\/p>\n

Because of the Senate’s anticipated amendments to the House budget bill, the House may reject the Senate version and a conference committee will be formed once again.<\/p>\n

The conference committee will comprise Senate and House members who will work on a budget bill agreeable to both chambers. When that bill is done, it again has to be passed by the House and Senate before reaching the governor’s desk.<\/p>\n

Last year, a budget deadlock between the House and Senate led to a government shutdown and unemployment among over 1,000 employees for days.<\/p>\n

The acting governor said last year’s shutdown \u201cis a difficult lesson.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cLike I said, we’re gearing up for possible shutdown.Hopefully, we will have the House and the Senate agree on a budget bill that we will eventually sign into law,\u201d Inos said.<\/p>\n

House Ways and Means Committee chair Ray Basa (Cov-Saipan) said yesterday that the House has its reasons for introducing the budget bill only recently but he said the Senate already had an idea of what a 2012 budget bill will entail since April 1 when Gov. Benigno R. Fitial submitted his budget to the Legislature.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Haidee V. Eugenio Reporter With less than a month to work on a budget…<\/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-17022","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\/17022","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=17022"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17022\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17022"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17022"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}