Over 200 Saipan families whose private properties were taken by the government for roads and other public uses may have to wait a little longer to receive a total of $800,000 in land compensation payments because of questions about the law itself.<\/p>\n
Public Lands Secretary Pete A. Tenorio said yesterday there is \u201cno firm\u201d date yet as to when the payments will be made \u201cas there are questions about the public law.\u201d<\/p>\n
House Local Bill 18-45, Draft 1 became Saipan Local Law 18-19 without the governor\u2019s signature on July 19.<\/p>\n
Within 60 days of the bill becoming local law, the land payments have to be made. That would be around Sept. 19, a little over two weeks from today.<\/p>\n
Gov. Eloy S. Inos has long been considering going the route of a certified question to get legal guidelines for pending judgments or obligations such as land compensation. But as of yesterday, that certified question has yet to be submitted as of yesterday.<\/p>\n
The $800,000 comes from the Managaha landing fees that are in the Department of Public Lands custody.<\/p>\n
There are questions, however, whether these Managaha landing fees are to be considered \u201cland leases\u201d or \u201cfees,\u201d and whether they could indeed be used to pay for land compensations.<\/p>\n
Under the $800,000 land compensation payment local law, at least 223 Saipan landowners will get anywhere from 89 cents to over $190,000 based on DPL data.<\/p>\n
Rep. Anthony Benavente (Ind-Saipan), author of the land compensation bill, plans to introduce another bill appropriating some $2 million in remaining Managaha landing fees also to pay Saipan landowners whose properties were taken by the government for public use.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Over 200 Saipan families whose private properties were taken by the government for roads and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":35,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[175],"class_list":["post-178151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","tag-dpl"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178151","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\/35"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178151"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178151\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}