{"id":209934,"date":"2015-09-08T08:00:09","date_gmt":"2015-09-07T22:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/?p=209934"},"modified":"2015-09-08T08:00:09","modified_gmt":"2015-09-07T22:00:09","slug":"senate-adopts-145m-budget-figure-for-fy-2016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/senate-adopts-145m-budget-figure-for-fy-2016\/","title":{"rendered":"Senate adopts $145M budget figure for FY 2016"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Senate has formally adopted Gov. Eloy S. Inos\u2019 proposed $145-million figure for general appropriations.<\/p>\n

\"Hofschneider\"<\/a>
Hofschneider<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In an emergency session last Friday, senators unanimously adopted the House of Representatives\u2019 concurrent resolution to set the revenue and resources amount for fiscal year 2016.<\/p>\n

The House and Senate are expected to meet today to continue budget conference talks to resolve differences over their varying ways of divvying up of budget.<\/p>\n

Pursuant to law, the Senate and House usually formally agree to a budget figure before drafting their versions of the budget. But the Senate adoption of a budget last Friday came after this process.<\/p>\n

\u201cTypically that\u2019s the order of the way we should have done it,\u201d said. Sen. Jude Hofschneider, (R-Tinian), Senate fiscal committee chairman and Senate chairman for the conference committee. \u201cWe were supposed to have an audience with the Secretary of Finance, but due to the two concurrent situations with the Internet [network outage and Typhoon Soudelor]\u2026we kind of passed that phase. But nevertheless, we take full responsibility and acknowledge it and pass it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is very important to recognize that it is $145 million general appropriations,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Asked if last Friday\u2019s vote meant a change in their position, Hofschneider said, \u201cAbsolutely not.\u201d<\/p>\n

The legislators must agree on a $154-million budget before the end of the month to avoid a government shutdown.<\/p>\n

The main point of contention appears to be between the House and Senate\u2019s interpretation of the law that would either allow or disallow the Legislature to use money not set as \u201csubject to appropriations.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the Senate budget, senators invoke a \u201cnotwithstanding clause\u201d to direct the Marianas Visitors Authority to transfer about $2.5 million in earmarked funds to the local hospital, the Commonwealth Health Center, and Divisions of Customs.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The House asserts that the use of earmarked funds conflicts with the NMI Constitution<\/p>\n

The Public School System has also expressed its disdain for what they see as an overreach of legislative authority within the Senate budget bill, which PSS believes would \u201cdecentralize\u201d spending authority from the Education Commissioner and give this to school principals.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Senate has formally adopted Gov. Eloy S. Inos\u2019 proposed $145-million figure for general appropriations….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":47,"featured_media":209941,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[20,508,65,2604],"class_list":["post-209934","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-news","tag-budget","tag-fy","tag-house","tag-jude-hofschneider"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209934","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=209934"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209934\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/209941"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=209934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=209934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=209934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}