Delegate Gregorio Kilili C. Sablan (Ind-MP) spoke at the Saipan Chamber of Commerce meeting yesterday, urging the community to continue succeeding together after the devastating Typhoon Soudelor.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe still have people who cannot return to their homes. Power is still out for much of Saipan. People have been out of work and lost incomes. Some businesses are closed, many are operating reduced hours.<\/p>\n
\u201cEven those of you who managed to get back in business after the typhoon lost revenue, lost inventory, have repairs to make, and many are paying for generator fuel and maintenance.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201c\u2026But if anything, Soudelor broke down some of the divisions in our society,\u201d Sablan said, noting the help people got from the Nutrition Assistance Program, whether they were a U.S. citizen, a green card holder, or a contract worker.<\/p>\n
He also noted FEMA\u2019s assistance to individuals, at $10 million to date.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have seen walls come down\u2014and not just from the storm. I have seen a community that understands that we are all in this together. And together we can succeed.\u201d<\/p>\n
Looking forward, Sablan said they have integration into the national food stamp system to work on, noting that if the CNMI had been in this program already, all the questions about who qualified for disaster relief and if there was enough money to go around would \u201cnever have been asked.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd we would have gotten the money into the economy a little faster,\u201d Sablan told the business crowd.<\/p>\n
Sablan, who has been on island since Typhoon Soudelor hit, expects to be on island until near the end of the month to continue help in relief efforts. This may mean he might miss the first few weeks of the start of sessions in the U.S. Congress, which was in recess in August.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Delegate Gregorio Kilili C. Sablan (Ind-MP) spoke at the Saipan Chamber of Commerce meeting yesterday,…<\/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":[56,67,6852,6333],"class_list":["post-209720","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","tag-business-3","tag-people","tag-sablan-soudelor","tag-typhoon-soudelor"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209720","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=209720"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209720\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=209720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=209720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=209720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}