Superior Court Associate Judge Joseph N. Camacho ruled yesterday that the Commonwealth Utilities Corp. can sue the CNMI government for unpaid utility bills. <\/p>\n
Camacho said the CNMI Legislature explicitly granted CUC the power to bring lawsuits and specifically mandated that CUC bill the government for utility services.<\/p>\n
Camacho made the ruling in his order denying the CNMI government\u2019s motion to dismiss CUC\u2019s lawsuit against the government for lack of capacity.<\/p>\n
In separate lawsuits filed in December, CUC, through counsel Michael White, also sued the Public School System and the CNMI government to collect on unpaid utility billings. <\/p>\n
White said PSS and the CNMI government are indebted to CUC, for utility services in the principal sum of $5,936,931.55 and $1,241,137 respectively, together with pre-judgment interest.<\/p>\n
The CNMI government, through assistant attorney general David Lochabay, moved to dismiss the lawsuit. He argued that CUC, as a government entity, lacks capacity to sue the CNMI government, CUC\u2019s creator.<\/p>\n
CUC, through White, argued that the Legislature designed CUC to be a separate, autonomous entity, with the power to recover the expenses of utility production from utility consumers, including the government.<\/p>\n
In his ruling, Camacho said the express mandate of the Legislature in the Commonwealth Code shows that CUC has the capacity to bring this claim for non-payment of utilities.<\/p>\n
Camacho said nothing in the Commonwealth Code or the executive orders cited by the Commonwealth indicates that the government is exempt from paying utility bills, or from a claim seeking to collect the fees owed by government consumers for utilities provided by CUC.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Superior Court Associate Judge Joseph N. Camacho ruled yesterday that the Commonwealth Utilities Corp. can…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[26,49,50,244],"class_list":["post-178284","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","tag-cnmi","tag-cuc","tag-power","tag-utility"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178284","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\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178284"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178284\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}