If the Commonwealth Healthcare Corp. fails to pay its utility bills\u2014now amounting to $14.7 million\u2014the Commonwealth Utilities Corp. must recover that lost revenue from residential and commercial customers, translating to a 19.9-percent increase in their monthly bills, according to CUC executive director Alan Fletcher yesterday.<\/p>\n
CUC legal counsel James Sirok called Fletcher to the witness stand at a hearing in Superior Court to explain the impact of CHCC\u2019s non-payment of bills amounting to $14,686,022 as of Jan. 2015.<\/p>\n
The hearing was on CUC\u2019s motion to hold CHCC in contempt for allegedly ignoring a $1.3-million bill for utility services for three months. CUC alleged that the nonpayment caused CHCC\u2019s total overdue balance to balloon to $14.7 million.<\/p>\n
Associate Judge David A. Wiseman placed the matter under advisement. He said he will issue a written ruling shortly.<\/p>\n
After CHCC chief executive officer Esther Mu\u00f1a completed her testimony, Sirok asked the court to allow Fletcher to testify about CUC\u2019s analysis of CHCC receivables and the effect it will have if CHCC fails to pay CUC.<\/p>\n
In his brief testimony, Fletcher said that from $418,240 in CHCC\u2019s receivables balance in October 2011, CHCC\u2019s unpaid bills rose to $14,686,022 in January 2015.<\/p>\n
Fletcher said CUC\u2019s forecast total revenue for fiscal year 2015 is $88.5 million, including CHCC\u2019s unpaid balance of $14.7 million. This brings CUC\u2019s net revenue to $73.8 million, he said.<\/p>\n
To offset CHC revenue loss, Fletcher said that CUC needs a rate increase of 19.9 percent from its remaining customers\u2014both residential and commercial.<\/p>\n
\u201cLike all businesses, CUC depends on receipt of cash payments from customers to fund payroll, operating expenses, and capital repairs,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Fletcher said that with the required 19.9-percent rate increase, this means the increase in average monthly charge required to offset CHC\u2019s non-payment is $33.44 for residential customers consuming 350 kilowatts an hour and 10,000 water\/wastewater, and $215.49 for commercial customers consuming 2,000 kilowatts an hour and 20,000 water\/wastewater.<\/p>\n
In her testimony why CHCC failed to pay CUC $1.3 million for the last three months of 2014 in violation of a court order, Mu\u00f1a said they didn\u2019t have the money since they paid their private vendors first.<\/p>\n
Mu\u00f1a said they wrote the Office of the Management and Budget in January 2015 to give them a $400,000 advance on their allotments in order to be able to pay the utility bills. The request was not approved, she said.<\/p>\n
Mu\u00f1a said they had to prioritize payments to private vendors because nonpayment was one of the things identified in the citations from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid.<\/p>\n
Mu\u00f1a said she communicated with Gov. Eloy S. Inos and the Department of Finance to get funding to make payments to CUC. She said they\u2019re asking for funding assistance and not free funding from the government.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re saying we cannot afford to pay everybody,\u201d Mu\u00f1a said. \u201cI cannot pay for something we don\u2019t have.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If the Commonwealth Healthcare Corp. fails to pay its utility bills\u2014now amounting to $14.7 million\u2014the…<\/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":[666,49,1749,244],"class_list":["post-192606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","tag-chcc","tag-cuc","tag-james-sirok","tag-utility"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192606","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=192606"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192606\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=192606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=192606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=192606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}