The Commonwealth Utilities Corp. emphasizes payment of their debt, as they work on their fiscal year 2016 budget. This year\u2019s budget is about a 6-percent increase from last year, according to executive director Alan Fletcher, largely due to debt repayment to two other government agencies.<\/p>\n
In their budget work session yesterday, CUC legal counsel James Hirok said that CUC met with the Commonwealth Development Authority executive director Manuel Sablan and their attorneys recently.<\/p>\n
CUC learned they would have to begin their dividend payment to CDA for debt owed, but Sirok indicated he would report the full details in executive session.<\/p>\n
According to Sirok, by October 2016, CUC will owe CDA about $4.32 million to CDA.<\/p>\n
From then on, CUC\u2019s yearly obligation will be $1.082 million, payable on a quarterly basis or $260,000 every quarter, he added.<\/p>\n
CUC board member David Sablan asked if the money set aside \u201cwould not exchange hands and just go into a fund.\u201d Sablan suggested that the CDA board of directors just want to see that money is put aside, but were not necessarily \u201cgoing to call it.\u201d<\/p>\n
However, Sirok responded that this was \u201cnot the message we got from their executive director.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe message we got is, if we put [money] into a sinking fund that would be used by CDA for capital improvement projects\u2014but not only by CUC, by all government agencies. We would have to borrow from CDA to use that money. So it\u2019s not an offset,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
CUC executive director Alan Flecther said the CDA dividend payment is a contractual obligation that they need to meet, proposing to the board that they \u201cdo not defer this any longer.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said that CDA has allowed for deferment but this does not change the liability or help CUC reduce the amount owed.<\/p>\n
The other debt service portion is for wharfage fees, another contractual obligation, owed to the Commonwealth Ports Authority, he said.<\/p>\n
This goes back to a 2008 agreement that covered wharfage fees for the prior 10 or 15 years that were not paid by the fuel supplier in the CPA port, he said, indicating this was passed on to CUC contractually.<\/p>\n
The board reconvenes today to further discuss and approve their FY 2016 budget.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Commonwealth Utilities Corp. emphasizes payment of their debt, as they work on their fiscal…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":47,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[20,366,49,3596],"class_list":["post-198498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","tag-budget","tag-cda","tag-cuc","tag-james-hirok"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198498","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\/47"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=198498"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198498\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=198498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=198498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=198498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}